


Shoot a Hole into the Sun

by keire_ke, PR Zed (przed)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, everyone lives in avengers tower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 14:58:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19253503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/pseuds/keire_ke, https://archiveofourown.org/users/przed/pseuds/PR%20Zed
Summary: It was Nat who'd noticed the pattern.  Every afternoon at exactly the same time, Steve and Barnes would share a heart-in-their eyes-hug, and then moon over each other at a table in their favourite coffee shop in the Tower.Sam and Nat spend their afternoons making fun of the old people in love.  Which maybe isn't the smartest thing in the world when they just might be in love themselves.





	1. Dumbasses in Love

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in an alternate version of the MCU where Ultron never happened, Civil War was resolved… civilly, and everyone lives in Avengers Tower.
> 
> **Author's Note** : A huge thank you to keire_ke for her gorgeous inspiring art and encouragement during the writing of this beast. And another huge thank you to [halotolerant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant) for outstanding beta help. And also to the mods of the Cap Reverse Big Bang for their tireless work in organizing such a wonderful event.

Sam Wilson had already packed away his pistols and was just putting his ear protectors back in his gun range locker when his phone rang. Natasha didn't even wait for him to say hello.

"Get up here, Wilson, or I'm giving away your seat."

"I'm fine, Nat. How are you?" He'd learned his manners from his mom, but the sarcastic tone was all his sister's doing. Sylette may have been two years younger, but she was a grandmaster of sarcasm.

"It's your favourite seat," Nat continued without even acknowledging he'd said a word. "It's got the best view."

Sam sighed, and then asked the important question.

"Did you get the table in the corner, with the best sightlines, or the one further back?"

"I'm not an amateur. I got the one with the best sightlines. I had to glower at a couple of Stark Industries flunkies to get it, but it was worth it." She paused for a second. "Steve just came in. So, if you don't want to miss the show, get up here now."

Nat hadn't said hello, so he wasn't going to say goodbye. He just hung up, shouted a quick "see you" to Barton, who was currently murdering Uptown Funk in the shower, and hustled to the elevator.

"Level three, please, JARVIS." 

"Shall I place your usual order at the coffee bar, sir?" the AI asked.

"Yes, thank you, JARVIS." 

It paid to be friends with Stark's AI. By the time he burst out of the elevator and made it to the coffee shop, his butterscotch latte was sitting on the counter. (Hey, he'd been training with super-powered Avengers all day. He deserved the extra calories. In fact, he _needed_ them.) Sam scooped up the cup, dropped a single in the tip jar, and settled beside Nat in his favourite seat.

"You're late," Nat said without her gaze from the subject of her surveillance. She was already halfway through her green tea Frappuccino.

"Did I miss anything?" Sam asked. "Please tell me I didn't miss anything."

"You missed me nearly giving your seat to Tony."

"But you didn't. Because you love me best." Sam gave Nat his widest smile. Her head didn't turn, but he saw her eyes flick briefly his way and counted that as a win.

"I find you less annoying. Don't mistake it for love."

"I find you less annoying, too." Sam nudged her foot with his, and was rewarded with a kick to the shins. A light kick, one that hardly even hurt, which definitely meant that Nat loved him best. "Now, what did I miss?"

"Nothing much." She nodded at the table both their chairs were aimed at. Sitting in one of the two chairs at the table was Steve Rogers, Captain America, leader of the Avengers, looking like nothing so much as a fifteen-year-old kid waiting for his first date, happy and nervous and practically bouncing in his seat. 

"Steve's got their usual order," Nat said. "I had a meeting with him and Fury before this, and I think he was actually vibrating fast enough to rupture the space-time continuum when Nick went two minutes late."

"Of course, he was. He had to get down here to meet his boo. Speaking of whom…"

The smile on Steve's face got wider, and he started to stand up. Sam turned in time to see Barnes come in, looking every bit as love-struck as Steve. The two of them met in what would have been the most emotionally raw, intense hug Sam had ever seen, if they hadn't done exactly the same thing every day for the past three weeks.

"There we go," Sam said. "Dumbasses in Love, Episode 21."

"Ugh," Nat said. "I keep thinking they're going to get over it, but they don't."

"I know," Sam said, watching as Captain Ridiculous and Sergeant Sunshine finally broke off with the hug already and sat down at their table. "It's completely disgusting." 

It was Nat who'd noticed the pattern. Every afternoon at exactly the same time, Steve and Barnes would share a heart-in-their-eyes hug, and then moon over each other at a table in their favourite coffee shop in the Tower. Which also happened to be Sam and Nat's favourite coffee shop in the Tower. (Sam would have wondered about why there were so many coffee shops in the Tower, but he'd met Stark. The dude lived on caffeine and trail mix.)

He and Nat had started planning their days around being in the coffee shop just ahead of Steve and Barnes so they could make fun of the old people in love. 

  


Steve might have been Sam's best friend (second best friend, Barnes would have said), but that didn't mean he couldn't mock the guy. In fact, he kind of felt like it was his duty to mock him. That he got to mock Barnes at the same time was an added bonus.

" _Bozhe moy_ ," Nat said. "They've moved to the holding hands part quicker today."

Nat was right. Steve and Barnes usually waited a whole ten minutes before they started with the earnest handholding, but today they'd barely taken two sips of their coffee before Steve had reached out and tenderly stroked the back of Barnes' hand. Sam smiled. He'd suspected this was coming.

"You owe me a latte," Sam said.

"The bet was holding hands in less than five minutes."

"It's been less than five minutes."

"It's been six minutes and 15 seconds since Steve arrived." Nat held up her phone, the timer now showing six minutes and 23 seconds. 

"It's been three minutes since Barnes arrived." Sam held up his own phone timer, three minutes and 32 seconds plainly showing.

"You didn't specify it was when Bucky arrived," Nat argued.

"It makes sense that the time wouldn't start until both of them are here." Sam looked up to the ceiling slightly. "What do you think, JARVIS?"

"I think my intelligence could be better spent on tasks other than settling bets between Avengers," JARVIS said, making Sam frown. "But I must side with Master Wilson and agree that it seems reasonable that both Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes must be here before the time starts on your ridiculous bet."

Sam gave a fist pump, and Nat spared him an eyeroll.

"Fine. I owe you a latte." She sucked at her straw and finished the last of her Frappuccino with a noisy slurp. "Now, what's the bet for tomorrow?"

* * *

He and Nat started making their bets more elaborate. They set ground rules and drafted JARVIS, over the AI's strenuous objections, as timekeeper and referee.

"I'd like to point out that this is a tremendous waste of my computing power," JARVIS said, a week later, "but I can confirm that Captain Rogers has in fact used the term 'sweetheart' five times in less than five minutes and that Ms. Romanoff owes Master Wilson a sushi dinner."

"Yes!" Sam hissed, as he did the closest thing he could manage to a victory dance without actually getting out of his seat and attracting the attention of the dumbass super soldiers who'd just won him a tasty raw fish dinner at his and Nat's favourite restaurant.

"Fine," Nat said with a kick to his toe that was practically a love tap by her standards. "I'll get the sushi, but you're picking up the tab for the sake."

"Anything you want." He paused for effect. "Sweetheart." Sam gave her a grin, and was rewarded with an almost smile from Nat.

"It's a good thing I like you," she said, her almost smile still haunting one corner of her mouth.

"You say you like me now, but you'll say you love me after you get some of your nasty uni sushi."

"You just don't appreciate the finer things in life, Sam."

"I don't appreciate sea urchin." He gave a shudder, remembering the one time he'd let Nat talk him into trying her uni. He was sticking to toro and hamachi, thank you very much.

That night, they managed to demolish three platters of sushi, and two bottles of Nat's favourite plum sake. (Sam even had enough sake that he lost his mind and tried uni one more time, and one more time swore he'd never make that mistake.) Walking back home to the Tower through the streets of Manhattan, leaning against Nat, both of them feeling pleasantly full and drunk enough to be loose but not so drunk that they weren't keeping an eye out for stray super villains, Sam thought it really didn't get much better than this.

"Thanks for the sushi," Nat said, when JARVIS stopped the elevator at her floor.

"Thanks for the sake," Sam said, leaning in to give her a hug. Which proved just how drunk he felt. Usually, he was far too terrified to give Nat more than a quick pat on the arm.

Astoundingly, she hugged him back.

"Goodnight, Sam," she said, her voice husky in his ear. Then she turned and was gone.

"Goodnight," Sam whispered after JARVIS had already closed the door.

"Did you say something, sir?" JARVIS asked, though Sam was sober enough to realize that the AI would be able to understand him no matter how low he spoke or how drunk he was.

"Absolutely nothing," Sam quickly answered, not wanting to discuss the jumble of feelings that were suddenly tumbling around in his guts with Tony Stark's sentient building. Because Nat was his friend. He made fun of their super soldier friends with Nat. He went for coffee with her. He got drunk with her. He most emphatically did not have feelings for her. And Nat most emphatically did not have feelings for him or anyone else that he knew of.

"I thought not, sir," JARVIS said, making Sam wonder, not for the first time, exactly how much more than his human inhabitants JARVIS understood.

The next morning, with less alcohol and more coffee and aspirin in his system, Sam was able to convince himself that anything he'd thought he'd felt about Nat the night before had been a mirage, the product of too much plum sake mixing with wasabi. Nat's morning text with the day's bet ( _barnes makes rogers laugh within three minutes, loser buys winner cupcakes from the good bakery_ ) just made him more certain that Nat's feelings for him were the same she had for Steve and everyone else on the team: friendship and loyalty and nothing more.

And so, things went on. 

Sam trained with his teammates. He went to Avengers meetings. He was one of the flyers on Avengers missions, trading reconnaissance duties with Tony and Rhodey, and sniper duties with Barnes.

And any time they were in the Tower, he and Nat watched the latest afternoon episode of Dumbasses in Love.

In hindsight, it was stupid of him to assume that while they were watching Dumbasses in Love, the two dumbasses in question weren't watching them back.

That assumption was shattered one afternoon in the coffee shop. Steve and Barnes were doing their usual stare into each other's eyes crap, and Nat had just gone to buy cake pops for them both, his prize for winning the latest bet (how long the dumbasses could stare into each other's eyes without a word: five minutes and 43 seconds).

Sam had just taken a sip of coffee when it happened. Barnes turned his head, caught Sam's eye, and winked.

Sam choked, only just barely kept the coffee from coming out of his nose. He was still spluttering when Nat came back to the table and handed him his cake pop.

"What's the matter with you?" she asked, pounding him on the back a few times before she sat down across from him and started nibbling delicately on her own cake pop.

"Barnes knows," Sam said, a cold dread settling in his stomach.

"Knows what?" Nat asked with a complete lack of concern.

"That we're watching them."

Nat grinned.

"Well, he'd be pretty bad at the whole superhero thing if he hadn't noticed us watching them."

"They've both had their heads so far up their dumbasses I didn't think they'd notice us." Sam concentrated on his cake pop and tried not to hyperventilate.

"Don't worry about it." Nat patted his hand. "I'm sure Barnes isn't going to kill you." She glanced over to the super soldier in question. "Pretty sure, anyway," she said with a grin.

"Ha ha," Sam said, and took a vicious bite of chocolate cake and frosting.

"I'll protect you if he tries anything."

"You better."

Nat hooked one foot around Sam's ankle and they sat like that, feet linked under the table, until Sam's panic attack finally eased up. He didn't think about how calming it was, having Nat's foot wrapped around his own. 

He didn't think about that at all.

* * *

The next morning, Sam headed down to the Tower gun range for his weekly lesson with Clint. Clint might have favoured a weapon invented in the Paleolithic era, but Nat had pointed out that he was brilliant with any ranged weapon, and a damn fine teacher when he wasn't tripping over his own feet getting enough coffee to feed a caffeine habit that made Tony Stark look like an amateur. Sam was looking to improve his accuracy while he was flying, and Clint had him well on the way to doing just that.

Usually, when Sam got to the range, Clint was already there, working on elaborate tricks shots with his bow before he got down to the business of teaching Sam how to become even more deadly with his Steyr pistols, but today the range was deserted, the space dim and echoing.

"Lights on, please, JARVIS."

"Of course, sir," JARVIS said. The lights came on, illuminating the traditional gun range down one side of the floor, and the cavernous space with ladders and platforms and room enough for Sam to give his wings a work out where he and Clint practiced their less gravity-bound marksmanship.

"Is Clint running late, JARVIS?" Sam asked as he headed to his locker.

"Master Barton has not informed me he has been held up."

"Dammit, Clint," Sam muttered under his breath. He pulled out his Steyr pistols and started running the weapons inspection that was second nature to him after all these years. At least he'd be ready to go when Clint finally managed to haul his ass down here.

He'd finished with the pistols and was starting the pre-flight check on his wings when he heard footsteps behind him.

"It's about time you got-" Sam turned toward the sound, expecting to find Barton, hair mussed and as frazzled as always. Instead, he found the Winter Soldier looming in front of him in full tac gear.

"Boo," the Soldier said, with a slight, amused smile.

In spite of himself, Sam jumped. Then he pushed the Soldier, Barnes, away with a two-armed shove to his chest.

"What the hell, Barnes?" he snapped, one hundred per cent not concerned that Barnes was here to razz him about his and Nat's coffee shop voyeuristic tendencies. He scowled at Barnes, then looked to the ceiling. "A little warning would've been nice, JARVIS. I thought we were friends."

"Sergeant Barnes wanted to surprise you," JARVIS said without a hint of apology.

"Sergeant Barnes is an asshole," Sam said, looking said asshole right in the eye.

"Sorry," Barnes said without looking sorry at all. "I didn't think I'd scare ya."

"You didn't scare me. You just startled me, is all."

"Isn't startled just a synonym for scared?"

"Fuck you, Barnes." Sam pulled himself to his full height and shook the tension out of his shoulders. "Now, what the hell are you doing here?"

"Barton got pulled onto some super urgent mission with Stark. He asked me to come and help you out."

Barnes went silent after that, stood there calmly, waiting for Sam to either accept or reject his help. And Sam wasn't entirely sure which way he was going to jump. Because, him and Barnes, they weren't exactly friends. Not like he and Steve were.

He and Barnes gave each other shit on missions over the stupid things they'd seen each other do. And they bonded over stupid things they'd seen Steve do. Letting Barnes help him out on the range, that just felt like giving the asshole more ammunition to give him shit over.

"If I let you help me, are you going to make fun of me?" Sam asked with narrowed eyes.

"No." Barnes' tone was even.

"Are you sure?" Sam pressed.

"Yeah, I'm sure. Whaddaya want me to do, Wilson? Make a pinky promise?" Barnes smirked and raised his left hand, wiggling his metallic little finger at Sam.

"Shut up," Sam said, and pushed Barnes' hand away. There was only one person he did pinky promises with, and his sister wasn't here.

"I'd swear on a stack of Bibles, but God and me aren't on real good speaking terms these days."

"You don't have to swear," Sam backed off. Because now _he_ was starting to feel like the asshole in this situation. "I trust you." And he did. He trusted Barnes to have his back in the field, even if he didn't trust him not to be an asshole and a dumbass off it.

"So, we gonna do this?" Barnes asked.

"Yeah, I guess we are."

"Okay." Barnes gave him a grin, and then they got to work.

It turned out that Barnes was a great teacher.

He started out watching Sam shoot while flying, and managed to catch the small movement Sam was making at the end of a dive that was throwing off his aim that even Clint hadn't noticed. They worked on his technique for twenty minutes until Sam got to the point where he was hitting his target every time.

Then they moved on to the regular range, where they worked with pistols. Even with Barnes' help, Sam couldn't match Barnes' freaky accuracy. But he did beat his own old scores.

The whole time, Barnes was nothing but helpful and supportive. He didn't even mock Sam when he missed the occasional shot. So, Sam should have known that something was coming.

They were both finishing up their final clips. Barnes took his final shot, hitting his target with casual ease, then put his Skorpion pistol on the shelf in front of him. He watched Sam take his last three shots, shots that went exactly where he had wanted them, Sam was pleased to note. 

They both pulled off their ear protectors, and then Barnes bent down and started picking up his spent shells and dropping them into the bucket at his feet. 

Stark had robots that did that sort of thing, but every time Sam had seen Barnes down here, he'd always picked up his own shells. He supposed the habits of being a brain-washed assassin programmed to leave no evidence behind didn't die easily. Sam figured he'd keep him company and started picking up his own shells.

"You know I got the same kind of serum as Steve, right?" Barnes said as he dropped a handful of shells in the bucket, the plink of metal hitting plastic punctuating his words. 

"Yeah, I've seen you in action, Barnes. Super strength, super speed. Yadda, yadda." Sam was paying attention more attention to the shells at his feet than Barnes.

"You know what else I have?" Barnes asked.

"What?"

"Super hearing."

Sam was paying attention now. He dropped another handful of shells in the bucket, then slowly stood, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Barnes stood himself, crossed his arms, and looked at Sam with what seemed like deadly intent. Sam braced himself, not entirely sure what was coming.

"Dumbasses in Love?" Barnes said, his mouth turning up in a crooked grin. "Are we up to episode 41 or 42 now?" 

"Forty-three," Sam said without even having to think about it. Then he felt his cheeks burn with embarrassment. "I'm sorry," he blurted out, not even sure what he was sorry about. Him and Nat watching Steve and Bucky like they were a Netflix show that dropped a new episode every afternoon, or naming the show, or keeping track of episodes, or discussing the ridiculous things Steve and Bucky had done this week like teenagers talking about a fucking episode of The Bachelor?

"I'm not mad," Barnes said, holding up one hand in a conciliatory gesture. "I didn't bring this up because I'm mad or I wanted an apology. I really don't care what anyone else thinks about us."

"We weren't…" Sam started, then stopped again, trying to think of what he and Nat _weren't_. "We weren't making fun of you. Not really." Sam paused again before he continued. "I think we're kind of happy for you. That you two got a second chance. That you have each other."

"That's nice of ya, Wilson." Barnes directed a smile at him that was almost as sunny as the ones he gave Steve. 

"I know you said you don't want an apology, but I'm sorry," Sam said in a rush. "I'm sorry that you had to go through what you did. I'm sorry for all of it."

Barnes' expression got serious.

"I'm not."

"Not what?"

"I'm not sorry about what I went through." Sam's disbelief must have shown on his face, because Barnes jutted his chin out and squared up across from Sam like he was getting ready for a fight.

"Here's the thing, Wilson," Barnes said, his voice low and even, like he'd rehearsed these words a million times. "Even if everything hadn't happened the way it did, if Hydra hadn't brainwashed me and Steve hadn't turned into an ice cube for 70 years, we still wouldn't have had a happy ending back then. If we'd both survived the war, we'd have spent the next forty years hiding what we were. But to wake up in the future and find that not only do we have a second shot, but that we can be open about it? That loving each other isn't illegal? That we can even get married if I'm dumb enough to say yes the next time Steve asks me? I'm not sorry about that one little bit." 

"That's…good." Sam knew he sounded hesitant, so he cleared his throat and tried again. "That's great, actually."

"Enough about my sad story. What about you and Nat? How long have you been together?"

Sam felt the world stutter to a halt around him. He and Nat? Together? What the fuck?

"We're not together," he said. "What the fuck, Barnes?"

"Aw, c'mon. You don't have to pretend with me. You may've been watching me, but I've been watching you, too. You two are always together. You play footsie at the coffee shop. Hell, I've seen you play footsie at team meetings. And that last op we were on, Nat threatened to garrote Steve if he put you in, and I quote, unnecessary danger." Barnes chuckled. "I thought Steve's eyes were going to pop out of his head. She's not even that protective of Clint, and Clint's the one who brought her in from the cold."

"We're not together," Sam repeated. "We're just, you know, friends. Good friends," he added when Barnes stared at him dubiously.

"Friends?"

"Yep." Sam popped the P, crossed his arms, and glared at Barnes, dumbass extraordinaire.

"Okay, sure. You're friends," Barnes said like he didn't believe it at all. He sighed, rolled his eyes, and then looked at Sam steadily. 

"Look," Barnes said. "You say you're just friends with Nat, then you're just friends. But let me give you some advice. Don't wait for a happy ending to come to you. If you see it, and if it's something you both want, grab your happy ending. Grab it and hold onto it for as long as you can. Because in our business, you never know what's coming tomorrow."

"Okaayy," Sam said, wondering where the hell that had come from.

"Great." Barnes patted him on the shoulder and then pushed him towards the door. "Now you get out of here. I'll finish cleaning up, put your gear away."

"You can't put my stuff away. You don't know my locker combination," Sam said, suspicious that Barnes was being nice to him. He didn't want to end up with a locker full of silly string. Or worse.

"Please." Barnes rolled his eyes. "Hydra trained me to infiltrate the most secure locations in the world. I think I can manage your locker." He made a shooing motion. "Now, scram."

Sam wasn't keen on the thought of Barnes breaking into his locker, but he finally left him to it and scrammed. 

He headed back to his apartment in the Tower, and made himself an early lunch. He went to an Avengers readiness meeting. He helped Tony test a new pair of wings on the roof. He joined Nat in the coffee shop for Dumbasses in Love (episode 44), and lost their daily bet (because Barnes just wouldn't cooperate and hold Steve's hand for a five minute stretch). He joined Nat and Clint, back from whatever mysterious op he'd been on in the morning, for burritos at their favourite Mexican hole-in-the-wall, and was not at all surprised when Clint wound up with a lap full of sour cream and salsa verde.

It was a normal day, except for two things.

Barnes winked at him during Dumbasses in Love. Three times. And only when Nat wasn't looking, the asshole.

And the asshole's voice kept running through his head.

 _Grab your happy ending_.

What did that even mean? Sam was pretty happy now. He had a team he liked and respected. (With maybe the exception, at this moment, of Barnes.) He was doing good work. He had friends. Wasn't that his happy ending? 'Cause the thought of him and Nat together? That was just nuts.

Wasn't it?

* * *

All week, Sam's mind kept drifting back to what Bucky had said, to his assumption that he and Nat were a couple. And he finally started to think, yeah, why the heck not.

Not that he wanted to ask Nat out on a _real_ date. They were friends, and he was absolutely fine with that. But what if he invited her out on a _pretend_ date. A _fun_ date. One where they could get dressed up and go dancing and have a great time. And if they got to mess with a dumbass super soldier or two along the way, so much the better.

Everyone in the Tower knew that Bucky and Steve used the gun range as their own personal obstacle course on Mondays, so the next Monday, Sam showed up just as Bucky was about to start his run shooting down paper and holographic Hydra soldiers while Steve stood at the side, taking practice swings with the shield.

"Hey, Barnes. Steve."

"Wilson." Barnes pulled back the slide on his pistol and loaded the chamber. "Come for another lesson?"

"Naw. Clint's got me covered this week. I've just been thinking about what you said and I've got a question for you."

"Oh, yeah?" Barnes' tone was cool, but Sam could see him stand a little taller and lean a little closer, so he knew he had him interested.

"Yeah." He paused, and waited a few beats, hoping to get more of a rise out of Barnes. Sergeant Sunshine didn't take the bait, but Captain Ridiculous swallowed the whole thing. He looked almost as excited as he did waiting for his boo at the coffee shop. Sam grinned and went for the kill. "So, _if_ I were to ask Nat out on a date, where should I take her?"

"You really gonna do it? Ask Nat out?" And Sam had to hand it to him; Barnes kept his cool.

"Yeah, I thought I might."

"That's great!" Steve was absolutely not keeping his cool. He was bouncing in place and looked about ready to explode out of his skin. "You were right, Buck."

“And you owe me twenty bucks, Stevie,” he said with a wolfish grin.

“This is one bet I’m happy to lose,” Steve said, passing over a twenty without a second glance.

“Betting on me asking Nat out? You’re an asshole, Barnes,” Sam said, though with no real heat. It wasn't like he hadn't been making bets on the dumbass twins for weeks.

“I’m an asshole who’s going to help you plan this date." He ejected the bullet from the chamber of his weapon, and then headed back to the locker room, with Steve and Sam following him. "Let's go up to the coffee shop. I do my best thinking there."

"Is that what you call it?" Sam muttered under his breath, under no illusions that Barnes wouldn't hear him, and not caring a bit.

Barnes herded them up to the coffee shop, claimed their favourite table from a pair of Tony's lab flunkies, and sent Steve off to order coffee. Then he started outlining three possible places: a Brazilian steak house in midtown, a French bistro on the Upper East Side, and a Russian supper club in Brighton Beach. Barnes might be an asshole, but Sam had to hand it to him; he knew his restaurants.

"Not Masha and the Bear?" Steve asked when he arrived at the table with three extra grande lattes. 

"I know you're loyal to Brooklyn and all, Steve, but Masha and the Bear is a terrible place for a first date."

"But-" Steve started.

" _Terrible_ ," Bucky cut him off with no mercy.

"But-" Steve tried again.

"Terrible," Barnes repeated, clearly enunciating every syllable before he turned to Sam. "The steaks at Fogo de Chão are amazing, and Café Boulud has a Michelin rating, but I think you should take her to Tatiana. It's fun."

"Tatiana is too much, Buck." Steve made a face.

"It's too much _fun_ , Rogers," Barnes insisted with a pointed finger. "They've got a floor show and dancing, and the smoked herring and vareniki are to die for."

"Since when do you like smoked herring?" Steve said.

"Since I got stuck in Mother-fucking Russia for decades, Steve. They didn't always feed me with a fucking tube." Barnes' voice was steady, and Sam wasn't going to think about all the times Hydra _did_ feed Barnes with a tube. "Occasionally I got real people food."

"Smoked herring ain't real people food," Steve shot back, more than a bit of Brooklyn creeping into his voice.

"Don't knock it 'til you try it, Stevie." He took a sip of his latte and turned back to Sam. "You're taking Nat to Tatiana. Now, what are you planning on wearing?"

Sam spent more than an hour at the coffee shop, with Steve and Barnes planning out his date in between bickering with each other about double dates Steve had screwed up back in the day. By the time he'd finished his second latte (decaf, with skim), Sam had a plan for his not-date with Nat, and so much blackmail material about their two dumbass super soldiers.

* * *

Sam had already had more than enough coffee for the day, so when he headed back to the coffee shop for Dumbasses in Love, he ordered an herbal tea, and chai for Nat with her favourite currant scone. Steve and Bucky arrived just as he got settled at their favourite table, and kept giving him embarrassingly encouraging looks. If he'd been asking Nat out for real, he'd have been mortified.

When Nat was three minutes late, he gave her a call.

"I'm on my way." Nat sounded slightly breathless.

"You better be, or I'm giving away _your_ seat."

"You wouldn't dare."

She was right. But she also didn't need to know that.

"I might."

"I'm nearly there."

Nat walked in not thirty seconds later. She took her seat and he passed her the chai and scone.

"I nearly started eating that on you," he said as she took a bite of scone.

"You hate currants," she said in between chews, then nodded at their favourite dumbasses. "I see they beat me here."

"Yep."

Nat let her gaze drift over to the dumbass twins.

"Wait, are they watching us?" she asked.

Sam looked over at the Table Dumbass, and caught Barnes and Steve smiling in his direction. He glared back.

"Nah," Sam drawled, going for an unconcerned tone. "Why would they do that?"

"Why _would_ they do that?" Nat said, clearly not convinced.

While Nat's attention was on him, Sam noticed Steve turn in his direction and give him an encouraging nod.

"Did Steve just nod at you?" Nat said, demonstrating that her peripheral vision was even better than Sam had realized.

"Maybe?"

"Maybe." Nat clearly knew he was talking shit now.

"Well," Sam started, realizing that with Steve and Barnes giving the game up, it was now or never. "I was just wondering if you'd like to go to Tatiana for dinner sometime."

"For a bet?" Nat frowned at him.

"No, not for a bet. For fun."

"For fun," Nat said, putting more skepticism than he'd thought possible in that one word. "Like a date," she said, her voice flat and matter-of-fact. "You're asking me on a date."

"Yeah." he said. "Kinda. Not a date date. A fun date. I thought we could get dressed up and show those two dumbasses what romance really looks like." He nodded over at the super soldiers currently giving him the thumbs up.

"Let me guess. Barnes recommended Tatiana."

"Yeah. Steve suggested Masha and the Bear, but Barnes said Tatiana is more fun."

"Barnes is right. Tatiana _is_ more fun. Masha has a great kitchen, but zero ambience." She rolled her eyes at the dumbasses across the coffee shop, then turned back to Sam. "Okay, let's do this." Her expression changed to a slow-dawning smile, and Sam felt an answering smile form on his own face. This was going to be fun. "So," Nat said, "when are we going on this date?"

* * *

They decided on Saturday. 

Saturday was the traditional night for first dates, and they were going to make this the most epic first date ever, even if it was just for fun.

That left Sam four days to get ready.

Four days to check and re-check the restaurant's menu and decide if he really wanted to try smoked herring for the first time with Natasha there to laugh at him if he hated it. 

Four days to put up with Steve giving him supportive suggestions and Barnes giving him rolled eyes. 

Four days to look for the perfect suit, right up until Dum-E trundled into his apartment on Thursday evening with a garment bag held in its claw.

"Mr. Stark's compliments," JARVIS told him as he zipped open the bag and found the classiest suit Sam had ever seen, a rich burgundy three piece that Sam could tell was tailored especially for him. "For your date with Ms. Romanoff."

"Who told Tony I was going on a date with Nat?"

"I'm afraid my privacy controls forbid me from saying," JARVIS said.

"It was Barnes, wasn't it?"

"It may have been Sergeant Barnes."

"Sergeant Barnes is a loudmouth. But this is one nice suit."

"It is indeed. You'll find that the tie matches."

Saturday morning, Sam made a visit to his barber. If he was going on a date with Nat, he was going to make sure he looked _fine_. He made Dennis touch up his cut three times to get the perfect fade. When Sam told him he had a date, Dennis went all out on the shave, with the hot towel, beard oil, and the straight razor he only brought out for his special customers.

"Smooth as silk," Dennis said with his final stroke of the razor. "That's not going to bump up."

"That's why I come to you," Sam said, and gave Dennis twice his usual tip.

Haircut done, he headed back to the Tower and had a couple of hours before he was due to pick up Nat. So, he did what he always did when he had too much time on his hands. 

He called his sister.

"This better be good, big brother," Sylette said before Sam could even say hello.

"No hello? No how you doing?"

"Okay. How are you doing, Samuel? And what do you want?"

"So cynical, so young," 

"You don't want anything?" Even over the phone, Sam could tell his sister's eyebrow was raising.

"Nope."

"Okay." Sylette sounded unconvinced. "You got any big plans for Saturday night?"

"Yep." He never made anything too easy for his sister.

"And that is?" She sounded the perfect combination of bored and irritated that he'd aimed at getting from her since they were kids.

"I'm going dancing," he said, and waited for the fun to kick off.

"You have a date?" Bored and irritated made way for excited, though he'd underestimated just how excited Syl would sound. "Who with? Does Mom know? Where are you going?"

"Jeez, Syl. Don't get all worked up. It's not a date. It's just dancing."

"I hate to break it to you, big brother, but dancing _is_ a date. And you have to admit, it's been a while."

"It has not been a while."

"Name one date you've had since you joined that white boy super hero club."

"We're called the Avengers. And Rhodey's not a white boy."

"Don't change the subject. Name one date."

"Okay, it's been a while," Sam admitted.

"You haven't said who the date is with."

"Nat," Sam said, trying to sound cool.

"Nat?" Sylette's voice was practically a shriek. "Like, Natasha Romanoff, Nat? The Black Widow, Nat? _That_ Nat?"

"Uh-huh," Sam said, and this was an even better reaction than he'd expected.

"Nice, big brother. Just make sure she doesn't eat you alive."

"I told you, Syl, it's just for fun. And Nat's not like that."

"I'm sorry, Sam. But Natasha Romanoff. You have to admit you're playing in the big leagues going on a date with her."

"She's a friend."

"Says the guy who's friends with Captain America and Iron Man."

"To be fair, Iron Man is more of an acquaintance," Sam said, then paused. "Though Tony did give me a suit for the date. Which does seem more like something a friend would do."

"You're friends with Tony Stark. And you're going on a date with Natasha Romanoff. What is your life, big brother?"

"Right now, my life is amazing, and I thought I'd share it with my little sister."

"You're so generous." And there was that sarcasm he knew so well.

Sarcasm aside, Sylette spent the next twenty minutes making sure Sam had done everything he needed to. She talked to him on speaker while he buffed up his favourite pair of dress shoes. She helped him pick out the right cologne to wear. (Armani.) And before she hung up, she gave him a little sisterly advice.

"Have a great time, big brother. And remember what Mom always says."

"Be a gentleman," Sam said before Sylette could beat him to it. "I remember. And speaking of Mom, you can't tell her I'm going on a date."

"But—"

"You can _not_ tell her. She'll want to meet Nat and that's a lot to spring on anyone for something that's not even a real date."

"Fine," Sylette agreed. "Now go out and have a good time."

"I will. Thanks, Syl."

When he hung up, Sam definitely felt ready to take on a date with Natasha Romanoff.

He showered, and dressed, and put on just enough cologne. He tied his tie perfectly on the first try, which he was going to take as a good omen. 

One more look in the mirror to make sure he looked sharp, and then Sam stepped into the elevator.

"Nat's floor, please."

"Yes, sir. And may I say that you look very handsome this evening."

"Thank you, JARVIS." It shouldn't feel quite so satisfying, getting a compliment from an AI, but it totally did.

The elevator stopped with a barely perceptible jolt, the doors opened, and Sam stepped onto Nat's floor.

"Nat?" Sam took a few steps inside. He couldn't see Nat in either the foyer or living room. "You ready?"

"Just about." Nat's voice came from down the hall, and he heard footsteps approaching him. As she came into view, Sam gave an appreciate whistle.

He knew Nat was beautiful. She was the Black Widow, after all, famed for her beauty as well as her deadly fighting skills. But to him, most of the time she was just Nat. A colleague he respected. A friend he deeply cared for.

Tonight, though…tonight she was beautiful. 

She was dressed in an emerald green dress cut to flatter her curves without downplaying her strength, and short enough to reveal strong calves and stunning high heels. A necklace of green glass beads fell from her throat in a striking wedge. Nat was putting in an earring, another fall of green glass beads that matched the necklace.

"Nice," Sam said, with an appreciative nod.

Nat gave him a pleased smile that had none of the coquettishness he'd seen her use when she was playing for a target.

"Thanks, Sam." She finished adjusted her earring, and came close enough to touch him. "You don't look so bad yourself." 

"It's just the suit," Sam said, suddenly self-conscious. "Tony sent it up. It probably cost more than what I made at the VA in two years."

Nat reached out and adjusted his lapels.

"Trust me, Sam. It's not just the suit."

She smiled at him, and then before he could react, she leaned in and gave him a quick kiss. It was over in a moment, just the touch of soft lips to his, but it wasn't what he'd expected from Nat.

"I thought this was just for fun," he said.

"Just because it's just for fun, doesn't mean it can't be _fun_." 

"Oh, is that how it is, Romanoff?"

"That's how it is, Wilson." Nat patted his chest and gave him another kiss, this one just a peck on his cheek. "Now, come on. I'm dying for some vareniki."

Sam straightened his tie, smoothed his jacket and followed Nat to the elevator.

"This is definitely going to be _fun_ ," he said under his breath, but loud enough to tease a smile out of Nat. "The garage, please, JARVIS."

JARVIS deposited them on the floor of the garage that most people never got to see: the floor with Tony Stark's four-wheeled toys. Sam led Natasha past Lamborghinis and Lotuses, Maseratis and Morgans, until he came to the car he'd most wanted to drive. The car whose keys he'd found in a pocket of the suit Tony had given him. It wasn't as flashy or as expensive as the supercars that surrounded it, but Sam had had a thing for Aston Martins ever since he'd seen his first Bond film.

"Tony gave you the Aston?" Nat said incredulously.

"The car is a loan, Ms. Romanoff," JARVIS clarified. "But Master Stark has said you are both free to drive it whenever you wish," he added.

"Nice," Nat said approvingly. "Can I drive?" She held out one perfectly manicured hand for the keys.

"Nuh-uh," Sam said, jingling the keys by one finger. "My turn first. You can drive back."

"I'm going to hold you to that," Nat said.

"I know you will." Sam held the passenger door open for Nat, because his mom raised a gentleman, and then got behind the wheel.

He couldn't exactly open the Aston up on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, but he could still indulge his James Bond fantasies. They made it to Brighton Beach just after the sun had set. Sam pulled into a parking lot a couple of blocks from the restaurant, then they walked hand-in-hand down the boardwalk, watching the gloom of dusk settling over ocean, kissed by an early summer breeze. He amused himself by watching heads turned as they went by, and told himself it was as much for his fine suit as for the stunning figure Natasha cut. 

The outside of Tatiana wasn't that impressive. It was one of a group of restaurants lining the boardwalk, all tucked in front of a series of squat apartment buildings. The awning was slightly faded, and Sam could see traces of graffiti at the edges of the restaurant's front. A forest of plastic tables and chairs sat out front, inhabited by a few couples, but it was early enough in the summer that most people were sitting inside, avoiding the evening air that still had a chill in it.

Sam held the door for Nat, then stuttered to a stop at the threshold himself as the noise of the place overwhelmed him.

When Barnes had said Tatiana was too much fun, Sam hadn't been expecting… _this_. The room looked like a rave club had thrown up on a rich kid's birthday party, all neon and dayglo and streamers and disco balls. The tables were inhabited by big family groups, packs of dudes who looked like Russian mobsters, and the odd bachelorette party, and the music was loud enough that he felt the pounding beat in his chest. 

Most of the tables ignored them, but one group of Russian mobsters turned to look at them both, and Sam had the horrible thought that he might have fought one of them in his Falcon gear when the Avengers were called out to stop a bank robbery gone wrong the month before.

Nat looked over at him, and squeezed his arm.

"Don't worry," she said, squeezing his arm. "They know me here."

"I'm not worried," Sam said, and tried not to look like he was hiding behind his date for protection.

The hostess of the restaurant had noticed them, and Sam started to give his name, only to have the women throw her arms in the air.

"Natalia!" she screamed in a Russian accent smoothed over by years in Brooklyn. "Why didn't you tell me you were coming?" And then the let loose a stream of rapid-fire Russian that Nat responded to in kind. After hugs and air kisses had been exchanged, Nat finally switched back to English and introduced him.

"This is my friend, Sam," Nat said, wrapping her arm around his. "He made us a reservation. Sam, this is Irina."

"Good to meet you, Sam." Irina delicately shook his hand, then checked the seating plan at the host station, and clucked her tongue. "No, no, no, that table is no good for you. We will give you best table in house! Follow me!" 

Irina led them on a winding path through tables of Russian birthday and anniversary parties, to a table on a slightly raised dais with an excellent view of the stage and as much privacy as was possible in the crowded room. They'd barely settled when Irina re-appeared with a waiter who held two bottles in his hands.

"Tell me, Natalia, is it a night for vodka, or champagne?"

"Um, we're driving…" Sam started to say.

"Champagne it is!" Irina cut him off. "Pop the cork, Kostya!"

Sam watched helplessly as Kostya expertly popped the cork and poured them both glasses of champagne.

"Kostya will look after you," Irina told them, then turned to the waiter. "Kostya, make sure Natalia and her friend have everything they want. And keep their glasses full."

"Looks like we're Ubering home," Sam said, leaning across at Nat before taking a sip of, really quite excellent, champagne.

"If I may," JARVIS' voice emerged from the phone in Sam's pocket. "Mr. Stark has made provisions for this eventuality that do not require the services of a ride sharing service." 

"Don't tell me you can drive the Aston," Sam said, not sure if the idea of an AI, even Tony Stark's AI, chauffeuring them through the streets of Manhattan was alarming or amazing.

"I'm not licensed to drive in this country," JARVIS said, without actually denying that he _could_ drive. "But there is someone on call."

"Thank you, JARVIS," Nat said. "Now, could you please promise you won't listen in on the rest of our date unless there's a world ending apocalypse on the horizon?"

"Of course, Ms. Romanoff," JARVIS said, sounding slightly indignant.

"To our date," Sam said, raising his glass.

"To our date," Nat said, draining her glass with what was definitely not a dainty sip.

It didn't take too long before Sam decided that both Steve and Barnes had been right about Tatiana. It was both too much and too much fun.

They never saw a menu, but Kostya and his colleagues started bringing them plate after plate of food, some of which Sam could identify, and some of which he never wanted to identify. The vareniki _were_ to die for, and the smoked herring was…okay. 

Nat, though. Nat was brilliant. 

She bonded with Kostya and the wait staff, she made friends with the shy little birthday girl at the next table who'd clearly recognized her and spent all of her first course staring at Nat in awe. She even made a toast, in Russian, for the mobster types who invited them over to their table. 

After they'd each downed a shot of vodka with the mobsters and made their way back to their own table, Nat took one look at him and then kicked him under the table.

"What?" Sam said.

"Stop looking at me like that," Nat said, with a grimace, and Sam honestly didn't know what she meant.

"Like what?"

"Like that." She waved her hand at his face. "Like you think I'm…" She trailed off.

"Super smart? Super awesome? A super hero?" Sam replied. "Because you do know you're all of that, right?

"I'm not as smart as Tony. Or Bruce."

"How many languages do you know?"

"I don't know. Enough."

"I know English and enough Spanish to get in trouble in Mexico. And that's it."

"You were in Afghanistan. You must have picked up a bit of Pashto. A smattering of Dari."

"Well, I can say 'put down your weapon' in Pashto, Dari _and_ Arabic, but that's about it. But you, you're amazing, Nat." 

"So, you're not fluent in a bunch of languages," she said. "You're brilliant and kind and the best man I know. After Steve Rogers, anyway," she finished with a laugh.

Nat kicked him again, but this time she wrapped her foot around his ankle, just like she'd done so many times at the coffee shop.

After half an hour, the house music was replaced by four singers on the stage, two men in spangly suits and two women in bedazzled full-length evening dresses. Sam braced himself to be disappointed, but they turned out to have unexpectedly good voices as they churned out a set that ranged from Russian folk songs to 'Don't Stop Believing.'

When the singers finished their set, everyone in the place took it as their cue to rush onto the dance floor, and it filled up with everyone from toddlers to drunken bachelorettes to smiling babushkas.

Nat leaned in close to him, her expression happy and bright. 

"Do you dance?" she asked.

"Do _I_ dance? Pfft. You are looking at one half of the 1991 under 13 champion foxtrot team of Harlem."

"No!"

"Yes! Mom sent me and my sister to our Auntie Nichole's dance school from the age of 4 to 14. I think she did it to knock some manners into me, but the dancing stuck, too." Sam stood and held out his hand. "So, shall we dance?"

"We shall." Nat took his hand, and he guided her onto the dance floor, navigating around the tiny birthday girl and her friends who were spinning in a fair imitation of miniature Cossacks.

Sam showed off his foxtrot, not to mention his salsa, waltz and a bit of the jitterbug he still remembered. But then the music changed and he grinned.

"You ready for this?" he asked Nat. "'Cause this is some next level dancing."

"I was trained at a Red Room ballet school," Nat said, throwing her head back dramatically and affecting a Russian accent that rivalled Irina's. "Nothing scares Natalia."

Sam absolutely believed that. He took Nat more firmly around the waist, looked in her eyes, and nodded.

"Here we go," he said, just as the beat really kicked in and the tango took off.

They took the first few steps of the tango, and Sam felt everything click into place. It was like flying a rescue mission with Riley at his side, like facing down a super villain with the Avengers backing him up. Nat was following his lead, and he was following hers, Nat knowing instinctively when he was going to snap into a _cadena_ , and him feeling in his gut when she was ready to spin in a _colgada_. Both of them working perfectly in sync.

Between the lights and the music and the neon and the champagne, Sam felt like he'd flown to an alternate dimension, one where he was dancing on air with the most beautiful woman in the world in his arms. 

He didn't realize they'd gathered an audience until he gave Nat a final dip as the music faded and applause surrounded them. His awareness switched from Nat to the rest of the room, and there was the birthday girl and the mobsters and even Kostya and Irina, standing in a circle around them, clapping enthusiastically. Sam glanced at Nat with a grin that she returned, and then they both took an appreciative bow.

"You are a man of many talents, Samuel Wilson," Nat said as they returned to their table, wending their way through other dancers. 

"You have some talents yourself, Natalia Romanoff," Sam said, with a grin.

There was more champagne and another floor show, this time with magic and circus performers, and much more dancing, until Sam looked around them on the dance floor and realized that the crowds had thinned to just the Russian mob, a bachelorette party and them.

"I think it's time to go home," Sam said, when the mobsters finally left, and Irina started pointedly looking at her watch.

"I know," Nat said, though she didn't let go of him, just hugged him more tightly, her head on his shoulder. "But I don't want the evening to end."

"Neither do I," Sam said. "But I think Irina's going to kick us out if we don't go soon."

"Ahem," JARVIS piped up from Sam's phone. "I want to assure you I have _not_ been listening in on your date, but I did want to inform you that your ride is out front, whenever you are ready to leave."

"Looks like that's our cue," Nat said. With a sigh, she lifted her head off his shoulder and leaned in to kiss him.

This kiss was playful and perfect, just like Nat.

He pulled away from her, reluctantly, and then held out his arm. They said goodbye to Irina, tipped Kostya handsomely, and made their way outside.

"Your ride is just down the boardwalk, in the parking lot," JARVIS prompted.

They walked over to where they had left the Aston, and found Happy leaning against one of Tony's nicer limos (not that Tony had any limos that were less than luxurious), with a nervous-looking kid standing beside him.

"Hey, Happy," Sam said, feeling mellow and content and definitely more than a little drunk.

"Keys," Happy said, holding out his hand.

Sam fished the Aston's keys out of his pocket and threw them at Happy, who caught them easily and passed them to the kid.

"It's all yours, Carson," Happy told the kid. "Remember, get her to the Tower without one scratch."

"Yes, sir," Carson mumbled, then rushed over to the Aston.

"Your ride awaits," Happy said, and opened the back door for them.

Sam let Nat in first and then slid in beside her. 

As Happy pulled onto the road, Nat kicked off her shoes, wrapped foot around his calf, and smiled at him, her eyes full of mischief.

"So, Sam," she said, her voice husky. "Do you wanna make out like we're high school seniors on the way back from prom"

"For fun?" he asked.

"Absolutely for fun," Nat said, and how could he resist that. 

"Just pretend I'm not here," Happy said, then raised the privacy screen between them.

By the time they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and were heading up Manhattan on FDR Drive, Sam had lost his tie and Nat had lost her necklace. By the time Happy pulled the car into the Tower parking lot, Nat's hair was decidedly mussed, and Sam could feel the alcohol burning out of his system.

"Thanks, Happy," he said as Nat pulled him out of the car and into the elevator.

They held hands in the elevator, and Sam only reluctantly let go when the doors opened for his floor.

"This was definitely fun," he said. Hovering at the threshold of the elevator.

"It absolutely was," Nat said, looking satisfied. "We should do it again. Show the dumbasses what fun looks like."

"Yeah?" Sam asked, 

"Yeah." Nat took two steps over to where he was, grabbed him by the lapels, pulled him in for one last, very thorough kiss, and then pushed him away. "Next Saturday. This time I choose the place."

"Next Saturday," Sam agreed, and then the doors were closing on Nat and he was in his apartment alone.

He took the phone out of his pocket, and texted his sister.

_Best. Date. Ever._

He nearly put his phone away, but then sent one more text, this time to Steve.

_Barnes was right. Tatiana is TOO MUCH FUN._

He drank a gallon of water, swallowed a couple of aspirin and collapsed in his bed. Even with a hangover the next day, he still felt better than he had in ages.

* * *

In spite of him constantly bugging her, Nat kept the secret of where they were going all week. All she would say is that he should "dress sharp."

Saturday evening, Nat arrived at his apartment in a red dress that looked straight out of the '40s, with lipstick to match. She gave him an appreciative once over, and then a grin that told him he had her approval. The suit he was wearing this time wasn't a Tony Stark special, but it was one of his favourites, a dark charcoal grey with just a hint of sheen.

"You look handsome tonight," she said, and gave him a quick kiss. "Ready to go?"

"You haven't said yet where we're going."

"No, I haven't." She gave him a mischievous grin, then twirled the keys to the Aston around her finger. "It's a surprise."

Nat drove north from the Tower, into Hell's Kitchen, and managed the minor miracle of finding parking on the street. Then, she led him towards a club with an awning that read Swing 46. Inside, the club was smaller than Tatiana, and less chaotic. Tables topped with white linen tablecloths and candles surrounded a small dancefloor, with a raised stage behind it, and jazz music played over the speakers. This time, the hostess didn't seem to be a personal friend of Nat's, but she did guide them through occupied tables to an empty one right at the front with the best view of the stage.

They ordered food and talked and ate as the room filled up around them. They were just starting their main course as the band took to the stage, backing a singer in a suit that looked straight out of one of the old movies his sister always used to make him watch.

At the band's first note, Nat grinned at him and Sam felt a perfect glow surround him. He and Nat stood at the same time, perfectly in sync. They were first on the dance floor, and the last to leave it, when the band finally called it a night, long after midnight.

They'd both barely had a drop of alcohol, but Happy still showed up with Carson when they left the club. Nat tossed Carson the Aston's keys, and she and Sam jumped in the limo. This time, Happy didn't wait for them to say a word to raise the privacy screen, and Sam and Nat made out like high school seniors again, as well matched in this as they were on the dance floor.

"Who needs true love?" Nat whispered as she nibbled at Sam's ear.

"True love is overrated," Sam agreed, as he ran his fingers through her hair.

* * *

Three weeks in, it became just something they did, like training or watching Dumbasses in Love. Saturday, they'd go out, they'd go dancing, and then they'd make out like teenagers on the way home. 

One week, they went to a Brazilian festival in Prospect Park with Sylette and her new boyfriend, dancing in front of the band shell. (Sam once again made Sylette swear not to tell their mom he was seeing anyone.) One week, they hit a Salsa club in Williamsburg. One week, Nat found a Manipuri dance festival with free lessons for beginners. (After that one, Sam was convinced they could have gotten jobs as background dancers in a Bollywood film.)

Sam didn't really care what kind of dancing it was. It was just fun to dance with Nat. It felt right. As right as kissing her did.

But they weren't dating. He was quite sure about that.

"So, how are you and Nat doing?" Barnes asked one morning when they were at the gun range together. They'd started doing that a lot, practicing their marksmanship together. Kind of like they were friends, now.

"What do you mean?" Sam took his last two shots, then hit the button to retrieve his target, happy to see his groupings were exactly where he'd wanted them.

"I mean, have you grabbed your happy ending?" Barnes rolled his eyes as him, as if he were talking to an idiot.

"It ain't like that, man."

"That's not what I've heard." Barnes ejected one clip and loaded another into his Skorpion.

"And what have you heard?" Sam tried to sound as menacing as possible.

"I've heard rumours that maybe you do more than dance on Saturday nights." Barnes took a shot and made a perfect headshot. 

"You haven't been following us, have you?"

"Following you? No way." Barnes made another shot. "Not that I wouldn't love to go out dancing. Used to go any time I had a bit of extra dough, back in the day. But Stevie won't come with me. He may be the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan, but he's still got two left feet."

"Then how did you hear about what we do Saturday nights? Not that I'm admitting to anything."

"Happy told me. Says he keeps having to raise the screen in the limo so he isn't accidentally shocked."

"First of all, Happy's driven for Tony Stark for years. I doubt Nat and I could do anything more shocking than Stark."

"Not going to think about that, thank you very much," Barnes said, completely avoiding his gaze.

"Second of all, why was Happy telling you anything? Did you interrogate him?"

"No, I didn't interrogate him." Barnes was indignant. "Give me some credit." 

"Then why did he blab to you?"

Barnes didn't answer right away. He looked down at his weapon, fiddled with the safety and generally avoided Sam's eyes. He looked…embarrassed.

"C'mon, now you've got to tell me. Why are you hanging out with Happy?"

"We, um, kind of watch TV together."

"TV?"

"Yeah. We like the same show." Barnes clammed up again, and this time Sam could see that he was turning red.

"What show could be so bad that you don't want to tell me? Are you a secret Trekkie? Or do you watch the Kardashians?"

"It's Downton Abbey, all right," Barnes blurted out. "Sometimes when Steve is away, Happy comes over and we binge watch Downton Abbey."

"Downton Abbey?" 

"Yeah, I really like Lady Mary and I just want Thomas to make better choices," Barnes spit out in a rush, simultaneously looking embarrassed and relieved at spilling such a deep dark secret.

Oh, this was far better than anything Sam had expected. But before he could really enjoy the revelation, Barnes moved into his personal space and grabbed his arm in a punishing grip with his metal hand.

"If you. Tell. Anyone," Barnes said, his voice going all Winter Soldier. "I will end you."

"Don't worry, man." Sam pulled his arm away and straightened his sleeve. "I won't tell anyone you watch silly British white people soap operas."

"You better not."

"And you better not tell anyone that Nat and I are anything more than friends. Because we're not."

"If you say so," Barnes said, sounding not at all convinced.

* * *

The next day, Sam realized that Barnes hadn't actually promised not to say anything about him and Nat.

This became clear because when he and Nat arrived for the afternoon performance of Dumbasses in Love, they found a sign sitting on their favourite table. A sign that read "Reserved for Infatuated Idiots" in a beautiful copperplate script that Sam recognized as Barnes'. ("Hydra made me practice writing with the robot hand after they gave it to me. To improve my dexterity," Barnes had told him when Sam had noticed that Steve's murder boyfriend had a talent for calligraphy.) The cartoon at the bottom of the sign of him and Nat making goo goo eyes at each other, however, was just as obviously Steve's work. 

He and Nat turned to the dumbasses' usual table, and found Steve and Barnes staring back at them, chins on hands, eyes blinking innocently.

Like they were one person, Sam and Nat simultaneously flipped off their resident super soldier pains-in-the-ass.

"Dumbasses," Sam hissed out.

"Definitely," Nat agreed.

"We're not infatuated."

"Or idiots," Nat added.

"Absolutely not."

"Ignore them," Nat ordered.

"I'm going to."

And Sam and Nat mostly did ignore them. (They hadn't bothered with bets about the dumbasses for a few weeks, anyway.)

But every time Sam glanced across the coffee shop, there were Steve and Barnes, staring at them like _they_ were the once who were being ridiculous.

* * *

"Before I say anything, I just want you to know it wasn't my fault."

Sam had had more than one conversation with his sister that started that way, and history had told him that it usually _was_ her fault. He gripped his phone tighter, took a deep breath, and counted to 11.

"What did you do, Syl?"

"I told you, _I_ didn't do anything. But Kev might have let Mom know that you're seeing someone."

Kev was Sylette's current boyfriend. He was a teacher in their old neighbourhood she'd met when she was doing a presentation on the math curriculum she'd developed for the city. He was a decent enough dancer, and an all-round nice guy. Which made it too bad that Sam was going to have to kill him.

"I am _not_ seeing anyone," Sam said through gritted teeth.

"I know you keep saying that, but you kind of are seeing Natasha."

"We're just friends."

"Uh-huh," Sylette said, like she didn't believe him at all. "Anyway, Mom is inviting you both over for Sunday dinner."

"No," Sam said flatly.

"Kev and I are coming, too."

"Absolutely not."

"She wants us over there at four o'clock." Sylette continued on as if he hadn't said a word. "Probably so she can make sure Natasha is good enough for her boy."

"No way, Syl. This is not happening."

"Oh, it's happening, big brother. Unless you want to be the one to call up Mom and cancel."

Sam froze. Hydra and killer robots he was willing to face down. But saying no to his mom? He'd rather fight Barnes in full Winter Soldier mode.

"Yeah, I thought so," Sylette said, a laugh at the edge of her voice. "I'll see you Sunday."

Sylette hung up before Sam could say goodbye or no or anything else.

"Well, damn," he whispered to himself. He took a breath, put his phone in his pocket, and then went in search of Nat.

He found her in the gym, running through a karate kata that was all explosive speed mixed with displays of slow strength. If he hadn't been annoyed with his sister and terrified at Nat's reaction to being invited to a Wilson family Sunday dinner, he would have enjoyed watching Nat work out. Her moves on the training mat were like her moves on the dance floor, fluid and graceful, effort masked by apparent ease.

Nat landed one last tumbling run that ended with a double block, bowed off the mat, and then smiled at him.

"Come to watch an expert at work?" she asked, towelling the sweat from her face.

"I've got some bad news," Sam said, figuring he'd just rip the bandage off and get it over with. 

Nat immediately came on guard.

"What is it? More Hydra? Tony try to make another Ultron? The government trying to pass the Accords again?" She was immediately tensed up, like she was ready to fight or run, as the emergency called for. Sam almost wished he _was_ here to tell her Tony had accidentally created another murderous android. He'd rather fight a Stark creation than have to tell Nat about his mom's royal summons.

"Nothing like that. I just got a call from my sister."

"Is she okay?" Nat was looked even more worried. "Is your mom okay? Do you need to go to the hospital?"

"It's not _that_ kind of bad news," Sam said, raising his hands.

"Good." Nat's shoulders relaxed, but Sam could tell she was still on her toes, still vigilant against threat. "So, what's up?"

"My mom has invited us over for Sunday dinner," he said, then internally braced for a reaction, but there wasn't one. Nat was staring at him, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised.

"And?" she finally prompted.

"And nothing. That's it. My mom has invited us over for Sunday dinner."

"What am I missing? Because that doesn't seem like bad news."

"You don't know my mom!" Sam felt his heart racing, so he stopped, clenched and open his fists once, and then continued at a slightly lower volume. "Kev told her I was seeing someone, so she wants to meet you."

"Okay," Nat said.

"Okay?" Sam was approaching hysterical again. "You can't just say 'okay.' You don't just say 'okay' to meeting my mom. She's going to ask embarrassing questions and show you my baby pictures."

"I can handle a few embarrassing questions." She grinned. "And I'm looking forward to the baby pictures."

"She thinks we're actually dating."

"I don't know if you know this, Sam," she said, and leaned in closer, "but I'm a spy. I'm really good at pretending."

"You're not supposed to take it this well."

"I can get hysterical like you, if you want." 

"You're laughing at me, aren't you? You shouldn't be laughing at me. This is some serious shit, Nat. When I was in high school, my mom made one of my girlfriends cry."

"In case you haven't noticed, we're not in high school. And I'm not a teenager." She patted his front. "And if she's your mom, I'm sure she's a wonderful person." Nat resumed towelling off her face and headed for the locker room. "Tell your mom I'm looking forward to meeting her," she called back over her shoulder.

"This is not going to end well," Sam said, wondering if he could get Stark or Barnes to manufacture some emergency that would get them out of the city on Sunday. Out of the country, even.

Except he'd have to tell them why, and then he'd never hear the end of how he was afraid to face his own mom.

It looked like Darlene Wilson was going to meet Natasha Romanoff.

* * *

Sam woke up Sunday morning in a panic without quite knowing why. Then he remembered it was the day Nat was going to meet his mom, and the panic hit him even harder.

"Shit, Wilson," he said to himself. "Would you just calm down already."

He levered himself up and put his feet on the floor, hoping the cool of the hardwood under his soles would help ground him.

"Okay," he finally said, once the panic had flowed over and through him. "Let's do this."

Sam showered and carefully shaved, then fussed around the apartment, reading the paper and having a late breakfast. And when it was finally time to get ready, he put on his summer Sunday suit, the one he'd gotten for the days his mom managed to guilt him in to taking her to church, a single-breasted, light grey suit that was classic without being flashy.

He was on his third attempt at tying his tie when he heard Nat arrive.

"Are you ready?" she called from the living room.

"Nearly," he called back. He finished the knot, adjusted his tie, and then sighed in relief that he'd finally managed to get it right. 

"We can still back out," he said as he made his way to the living room. "I can tell Mom there was an Avengers emergency."

"She'd know you were lying when there was nothing on the news."

"I could tell her it was top secret," Sam said. He stepped in the living room, ready to come up with another excuse, and stopped cold.

By now, Sam was used to how gorgeous Nat was all dressed up to go dancing. She'd had a flashy red number on last night that had been dazzling as they'd Lindy Hopped their way across the Roseland dance floor. But this was different. 

She was wearing a simple white dress with a matching short jacket over top. Both dress and jacket were trimmed with a black embroidered border that was understated and elegant. She was holding a bouquet of white flowers in her arms, and she looked…nervous.

"Is this okay?" she asked, one hand smoothing an invisible wrinkle from the skirt of her dress. "I called Sylette for advice on what I should wear. And she said your mom likes gardenias." She thrust the bouquet out at Sam. "Do you think she'll like them?"

Nat looked…like a woman who was worried about meeting her boyfriend's mother.

Sam swallowed, his mouth dry as paper as all his assumptions about Nat and him and what they were to each other blew up like a booby trap set off by a trip wire. 

If they were just dating for fun, for a laugh, Nat wouldn't be visibly worried about meeting his mom. And he wouldn't have woken up in a panic this morning. Which led to the inevitable, terrifying conclusion that this wasn't just for fun. That maybe, they were both more serious about this than either of them had realized.

Barnes was going to laugh himself sick when he found out.

But Barnes wasn't here right now, thank God. Nat was. And the longer he went without saying anything, the more nervous she began to look.

"Is there something-" she started to say, and Sam didn't think he'd ever heard her sound _that_ unsure. Not when she wasn't playing a role for an assignment, anyway.

"You're perfect," he quickly said. "The dress is perfect. The flowers are perfect. Everything's perfect."

The worried lines disappeared from Nat's forehead, and she smiled, her expression perfectly happy.

"You really think so?"

"I really think so." He stepped forward and gave her a hug, being careful not to crush the gardenias. "Now let's go." He grabbed the keys to the Aston. "I can't wait to show off you, and the car, to the neighbourhood."

"I'm not sure I want to know what you think is more impressive, me or the car."

"You are, Nat," Sam assured her without missing a beat. "No contest, it's always you."

Somehow, Sam managed to stamp down on his own nervousness on the drive up to his mom's. He concentrated on making Nat laugh, telling her every embarrassing story about Sylette he could think of as a defence against all the embarrassing stories Syl and his mom were no doubt going to tell about him. By the time he pulled onto his mom's street in Harlem, he thought he was just about calm enough to survive the evening without a major panic attack. 

The parking gods were with him, and he found a spot just down from his mom's house. And found the car immediately surrounded by a pack of neighbourhood kids who abandoned their game of hide and seek to check out both the Aston and the Black Widow. After they'd let all the kids sit in the car, and Nat had talked to all of the girls, Sam finally eased them away.

"Gotta go, kids. Can't be late for dinner with my mom."

His arm around Nat's waist, he led her up to his mom's front door and knocked. While they were waiting for the door to open, Nat turned to him, the expression on her face more like she was waiting for a battle than a family dinner.

"Don't worry," he said. "Mom's going to love you."

"I thought you said your mom made one of your girlfriends cry."

Sam opened his mouth to tell a Goddamn lie that he'd been kidding, but then the door was opening and there was his mom, regal-looking in her Sunday best.

"Samuel," his mom said serenely, as if she didn't know he was probably panicking. "I’m glad you could make it.” She drew him into a hug, and then pulled back, her eyes going to Nat. “Are you going to introduce me to your friend?"

"Mom." Sam drew Nat forward, and he thought he could feel a slight tremble in her arm. "This is Natasha Romanoff. Nat, this is my mom, Darlene Wilson."

"I'm glad to meet you, Mrs. Wilson." Nat held out the bouquet. "I brought these for you."

"Thank you, Natasha. They're beautiful." She took the flowers graciously, and ushered them into the house, her expression entirely neutral and impossible to read. "And you can call me Darlene."

"Is that Sam?" Sylette called from the back of the house. "Because if I have to help make dinner, he's doing the cleanup."

Kevin emerged from the kitchen with frilly apron and a potato masher.

"Your sister is in a mood," he said, waving the masher behind him.

"I am _not_ in a mood," Sylette yelled back, then came into the dining room with her own frilly apron and oven mitts on her hands. "I was just checking the pork chops so mom could get the door. Hey, Nat." Syl gave Nat a hug like they were the ones who were siblings, and that seemed to break the tension Sam had felt building up in the room.

Suddenly everyone was chatting, his mom looked happy and Nat looked more comfortable than she'd been since she showed up at his apartment.

It very quickly became clear that his mom was not going to make Nat cry. (Not that he thought that was actually possible, but he also hadn't thought Nat would be nervous about meeting his mom.) In fact, the opposite happened. Darlene Wilson seemed to quickly decide that Natasha Romanoff needed a mom, and she was the woman for the job. Sam wasn't quite sure if the result was hilarious or horrifying.

Whatever the result, at the end of the night, Sam ended up with a dish towel in his hands with his mom up to her elbows in soapy water. He could hear the low murmur of Nat, Syl and Kev talking in the living room as he dried plates and put them away, an easy silence broken only by the clink of china and the swishing of water filling the kitchen.

"Nat's nice," his mom finally said.

"Uh-huh." He wasn't going to say more than he needed to on the topic.

"How long have you been dating?"

"A few months," he said. Then added, "It's not serious." He didn't want to say it wasn't real, because as of this afternoon he didn't think that was true anymore.

"Uh-huh," his mom echoed back, not sounding at all convinced. She rinsed a plate and put it in the dish rack, then turned to face him as he lifted it out. "I normally would say something like this to her, but I think you need to hear it more. Don't you hurt that girl, Samuel." His mom's voice was as serious as he'd ever heard it.

"Nat's tougher than anyone I know."

"I'll bet she is, but I think she's also more vulnerable than you realize."

Sam thought back to Nat standing in his apartment, holding the gardenias that now graced his mother's table, looking ever so slightly nervous.

"You're probably right, Mom."

"Of course I'm right." She finished of the last plate, and then dried her hands on the towel thrown over the over handle. She took the dish towel out of Sam's hands, turned him by the shoulders and pushed him out the kitchen door. "Now you go out and look after your girl. I'll be out in a minute."

Sam followed his mother's orders, heading into the living room. As predicted, he found Sylette had pulled out the family photo albums and was showing Nat every embarrassing baby picture of him that his mom had preserved.

Nat looked up at him, laughter in her eyes and a wicked smile on her face, and Sam felt a wash of what just might have been love sweep through him, making his stomach flutter and his face go hot. 

He sat beside Nat, and dropped a kiss on her cheek, just as Sylette turned to the page of pictures of his first bath. Nat turned to him, a question in her eyes. He shook his head, mouthed 'later' and then started threatening Syl with the album of _her_ baby pictures. 

It was one of the best family dinners he could remember, made better by having Nat beside him, and he was realizing that he was in far deeper than he ever could have imagined. He wasn't sure how Nat felt, but he really was an Infatuated Idiot. Emphasis on the Idiot part for not recognizing it before now.

His mom kicked them all out early—she had class to teach in the morning—so Sam found himself driving back home just as the sun was setting, leaving the pinkish glow of dusk on the horizon. As they drew closer to the Tower, Sam found he didn't want the evening to end.

"Do you want to come back to my place?" he asked Nat as he was making the final turn. "Check out what's in my Netflix queue?"

"Do you mean Netflix and chill, Wilson?" Nat asked with a laugh. Her voice was relaxed and low.

"I was thinking more Netflix than chill. We could watch a movie, make popcorn, eat ice cream."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nat turn and give him an evaluating gaze, her body as still as she got before launching an attack. He held his breath, waiting for her answer.

"That sounds wonderful," she finally said, her body relaxing back into the Aston's seat, and Sam found himself relaxing with her.

They parted in the elevator, Nat disappearing into her own apartment to change, Sam carefully putting his suit away and changing into sweat pants and an Air Force t-shirt.

Nat showed up not long after he had installed himself on the couch, freshly popped popcorn in a bowl on the coffee table. She was in a well-worn pair of yoga pants, slouchy socks, and a too-large sweatshirt she'd stolen from him. In her hands were two tubs of Ben & Jerry's and two of her special gelato spoons.

"Stark Raving Hazelnuts for you." She held up one tub. "Hunka Hulka Burning Fudge for me."

"Perfect!" Sam said, and made room on the couch for her.

They cuddled together and fed each other ice cream and tossed popcorn in each other's mouths as they watched every baking show Netflix had on offer. Sometime around 11, Nat fell asleep on his shoulder.

Sam didn't want to make any assumptions, so he turned off the TV, gently eased away from Nat, and tucked his favourite blanket around her. He drifted to sleep in his own bed with a smile on his lips.

When he woke up in the morning, the couch was empty, with the blanket he'd tucked around Nat neatly folded on one arm, a small slip of paper lying on top of it. He strode over, picked up the paper, and smiled.

 _Your couch is lumpy_ , the note read in Nat's spikey script. _Tonight, Netflix and chill at my place. Emphasis on the chill._ The second chill was underlined three times.

Sam couldn't stop grinning all through breakfast.

* * *

Sam had already arranged a session on the gun range with Barnes for the morning, so after he'd showered and dressed, he headed down to the lower levels of the Tower.

"Well, if it ain't Infatuated Idiot Number Two," Barnes said.

Sam didn't even bother flipping him off. He just asked, "How come I'm not Number One?"

"C'mon. You telling me you're Number One ahead of Nat?"

"Yeah, okay. You've got me there." He opened up his locker and started his weapons check. "You ready to get your ass kicked, Barnes?"

"You say that every time, Wilson. I'm still waiting for it to happen."

But that morning, Sam felt loose and relaxed, hitting his targets easily. He kept pace with Barnes, and very nearly did kick his ass.

"Not bad, Wilson," Barnes said, after Sam had hit a series of increasingly difficult targets while flying a swooping course in the open area of the range. "What's up with you this morning?"

"Nothing," Sam said, then kicked off, did a little flip in the air, and landed with a grin.

"That doesn't look like nothing." Barnes crossed his arms and fixed him with a skeptical stare.

"I'm just in a good mood." Sam holstered his Skorpions and tried, unsuccessfully, to scowl at Barnes. It somehow turned into an even bigger grin.

Barnes changed his tactic.

"So, big night out with Nat last night?" He tried to sound casual, but Sam could see the curiosity in his eyes.

"Nothing big. A little Netflix. A little popcorn. Dinner at my mom's."

He crossed his own arms and waited to see if Barnes was going to let that go. He should have known better.

"Nat's met your mom?" Barnes tone was neutral.

"Yep." Sam was absolutely going to make Barnes work for this.

"How'd that go?"

"Good."

"Nat and your mom get along?"

"Yep."

"Huh." Barnes stared at him, and Sam could see him deciding how much further he was going to push this.

Sam held in a laugh, and calculated how long he could last before putting Barnes out of his misery and _actually_ tell him about the dinner, when both of their phones started buzzing.

"You're needed on the roof, gentlemen," JARVIS said, his voice apologetic.

"So, I see," Sam said. His phone was full of messages from Steve and Tony and Nat on the Avengers group chat, ranging from _Avengers Assemble_ from Steve to _Get your asses up here_ from Nat.

Both of them loaded up with fresh clips and ammo and headed for the elevator, with Sam wishing they'd had time to clean their weapons before they'd been thrown into action.

"Do you know what's up, JARVIS?" Sam asked as they ascended the Tower. Barnes was pre-occupied with checking all his knives and adjusting the buckles on his tac suit.

"There's been an incident in New Jersey."

"Fuckin' Jersey," Barnes said under his breath. Sam couldn't exactly disagree with him.

When they reached the roof, they found a Quinjet powered up, its hanger door open. Steve and Nat waited at the bottom of the Quinjet ramp, and Tony, suited up, stood at the edge of the roof.

"What's going on?" Sam asked as they all jogged up the ramp together. Clint took off before the door was even closed, and Sam could see Tony take to the air and fly ahead of them. Sam buckled into a seat beside Nat, and Barnes took his usual seat next to Steve.

"There's been intel coming in for the last few days that AIM is up to something," Nat said with a frown. "Then, ten minutes ago, Bruce detected a major burst of radiation just outside of Newark."

"Bruce isn't coming with us?" Barnes asked.

"It was gamma radiation," Steve said. "He didn't think it was wise for him to come. Wasn't sure how it would affect the Big Guy."

"Fair enough." Sam liked Banner, but working with the Hulk could be unsettling. Especially if there was a chance he could react badly to some unknown radiation. As a rule, Sam wasn't in favour of unknown radiation. He frowned upon it.

"You good?" Nat nudged him with her elbow.

"Yeah. You?" He nudged her back.

"Yeah." She leaned, ever so slightly into his side and dropped her voice. "Last night was nice."

"It was." He leaned back into her. "After we get these AIM assholes dealt with, I'm looking forward to tonight."

"Me, too." She grinned at him, and Sam heard a huff come from across the jet.

He looked over, to find Barnes rolling his eyes and Steve grinning at both of them like Christmas had just come early.

"What are you two looking at?" he said.

Barnes pointed at Nat. "Infatuated Idiot Number One." Then at Sam. "Infatuated Idiot Number Two."

Steve grinned even harder.

Nat leaned forward, fixing them both with a more than slightly alarming smile.

"Remember, boys. I know where all the bodies are buried, and I'm not above burying a couple more."

Barnes rolled his eyes again, and Steve actually laughed.

"I hate to break up this love fest," Clint called back from the pilot's seat before things could escalate further. "But we'll have wheels down in one minute."

Looking out the front, Sam could see the approaching the Jersey shore, the land ahead a warren of container terminals and warehouses. Clint put them down in a parking lot surrounded by three of those warehouses. Tony made a flashy landing in the Iron Man suit as they all exited the Quinjet.

"According to Bruce, the middle building is the source of the radiation," Steve told them. "Nat and I will clear that one. The rest of you, maintain a perimeter. Bucky and Sam, you keep watch from the north building. Clint and Tony, you have the south building. Everyone, stay on the comms, and let us know if you see anything unusual."

"Sounds good, Cap," Tony said, his voice sounding tinny through the suit. "You ready, Legolas?"

"Let's go," Clint said, then slung his arms around Tony's neck. Tony blasted off and dropped Clint on his designated roof before he started hovering himself.

"Sam," Nat yelled at him as she and Steve headed off to their target. "You look after yourself."

"Same to you, Nat," Sam said, wishing he wasn't a grown-ass super hero and could give her a hug before she and Steve took on whatever was waiting for them. But he couldn't, so he gave a quick sigh and turned to Barnes. "Don't you throw off my balance in the air."

"I never throw off your balance." Barnes put an arm around Sam's neck and grabbed hold of his flying harness with his other hand.

"You _always_ throw off my balance, man," Sam said as he took off. However many times they did this manoeuvre, the weight of Barnes' metal arm always made Sam wobble a bit as he flew, and he had to adjust his wings to keep them flying straight. 

"I'm wounded, Wilson," Barnes said just before he let go and dropped to the roof with a roll that was unnecessarily flashy. As Sam hovered above, Barnes shot him a grin and a mock salute, then moved to the side of the roof, setting up a sniper station overlooking the entrance Nat and Steve had disappeared into.

"Wilson," Tony said over the comms. "You patrol to the north. I'll take the south." 

"Will do, Tony," Sam responded, then looked down at Barnes. "Call me back if you see anything weird down there."

"I'm a guy with a robot arm, Wilson. I _am_ weird."

"You know what I mean." Sam gave Barnes his patented _you are an idiot look_ , then took off, looping over container yards and warehouses, occasionally gliding over the water of Newark Bay.

"How's it looking out there?" Barnes asked ten minutes after Steve and Nat had gone into the building.

"Nothing unusual," Sam said. "A few boats being unloaded. A few trucks taking deliveries." He headed back to Barnes' perch, hovering over his teammate.

"Steve," Barnes said. "What's going on in there?"

"Standby," Steve said, his tone curt.

Sam dropped to the roof beside Barnes, glaring at the door Steve and Nat had gone through.

"Did he sound off to you?" Sam asked.

"Yeah," Barnes said without taking his eyes of his target. "There's definitely some bullshit going on in there."

"Great." Sam forced his muscles to remain loose, and launched back into the air again, going a bit higher so he had a better view. He was looking to the north when he heard it, a muffled thump and bang that he knew from experience could be nothing but an explosion. 

He turned south, the direction the sound had come from, in time to see a flash of flame and then a cloud of thick black smoke rising into the air from several container yards to the south.

"Explosion to the south," Sam said.

"Got it," Tony said, and Sam saw a red streak head towards the pillar of smoke.

"Keep your eyes peeled out there," Steve said, his voice still sounding tight and strained. "It sounds like our AIM friends might be launching a diversion."

"But a diversion from what?" Sam asked under his breath. "Tony, do you have eyes on our problem?"

"The explosion took out a stack of containers. Civilian firefighters are already on the way. I'm going to stay here, make sure they're safe."

After that, things seemed to happen all at once.

Sam caught a flash of movement to the north side of the building holding his best friend and the woman he was pretty sure he was probably in love with.

"Bogies at 10 o'clock," he told Barnes, and saw Barnes immediately swing his rifle to deal with the new threat.

Then there was a flash on the roof, and Sam had enough time to think, _fuck, bomb_ before he was hit by what felt like a lightning bolt.

He heard his wings short out, and plummeted the fifteen feet to the rooftop, taking the impact on his shoulder in an awkward roll. Barnes had already turned to the new threat, firing controlled bursts into the newcomers, five or six figures wearing AIM's stupid yellow hazmat suits. The newcomers hid behind a crackling blue energy screen that seemed to deflect bullets as easily as Steve's shield.

As he struggled to raise a wing to protect himself from the energy bolts their enemies were attacking with, he heard Nat's frantic voice over the comms.

"It's a trap. Retreat to the Quinjet."

Sam tried to start up his wings again, and got nothing but a laboured whine out of them.

"Wings are down. Tony, can you retrieve us?" 

"Give me a minute." Tony sounded as strained as all of them. Sam glanced to the rooftop where Clint was perched to find him and Tony fighting off their own band of hazmat suit-clad attackers.

"Shit." Sam struggled to unholster his Skorpions, and stay behind what little cover his battered wing provided, while he worked his way over to Barnes' position. Before he could fire one shot, Barnes took an energy blast. He was thrown back, and got up again, but when he stood, Sam could see that his fancy Wakanda arm was hanging limply at his side.

"Cover me," Barnes said, and Sam didn't have to be told twice.

Sam kept a steady fire of bullets aimed at their attackers, while Barnes fumbled at his utility belt and produced what looked like little more than a thin string attached to a small anchor.

"That ain't gonna hold both of us," Sam said as he fired another round and kept an eye on their attackers.

"It's Stark's tech," Barnes said as he attached the anchor to the side of the roof. "It'll hold." 

"You gonna be able to climb with one arm?"

"I'll manage," Barnes said, his teeth gritted in a way that told Sam he was probably hurting.

"You go first," Sam said.

Barnes paused a brief second, as if he was considering arguing, but then nodded. Keeping low, Barnes slid over the edge of the roof and disappeared from Sam's view.

"Down," Barnes said after a few long seconds. "Your turn, Sam." That was the first time Barnes had ever called him by his first name, and Sam didn't like it one bit. In action movies, frenemies only used first names when one of them was going to get killed.

"All right, _James_ ," Sam said, daring the action movie gods himself. He fired the last of his clip into his attackers, and turned and ran to where Stark's magic rope was waiting for him.

He almost made it.

He grabbed the rope and had started swinging his leg over the side of the roof, when an energy bolt hit him on the side. He felt every nerve in his body explode in pain, but forced himself to keep going until he was hit again. And one more time. 

His last thought as he hit the gravel of the roof and the world went from bright red pain to black nothingness was that Nat was going to be so pissed at him when she found his body.


	2. Infatuated Idiots

Nat came awake all at once, sitting bolt upright, her hand reaching out for a weapon that wasn't there, her eyes wide open, already looking for threats around her.

Not that there were any threats, just Sam's nicely furnished living room, a fuzzy blanket tucked around her.

She had a vague memory of leaning against Sam as someone on a ridiculous Netflix show tried to make a cake that looked like a rubber duck, but nothing beyond that. It was proof of how much she trusted Sam, that she'd felt safe enough with him to fall asleep on his couch. She looked down the hall, and saw the door to Sam's room open just a crack. She was tempted to walk those few steps down the hall, to open the door and pull back the covers and crawl into bed with him, spooning around him, taking comfort from his warm solid frame. 

Tempted, and but not quite ready to do it. 

They'd gone beyond the casual making out they'd indulged in at first. She'd never met someone's mother before, never gone for a Sunday family dinner. 

She wanted to be sure of what she felt before she moved any further. She wanted to make sure Sam was who she wanted, and that she was who he wanted. She wanted to hover for a little bit longer on the precipice of this thing between them, anticipating the plunge, letting the flutter of vertigo build in her stomach before she jumped.

She'd jump soon, she knew. But not quite yet.

She stood and stretched and folded the blanket neatly. Then she grabbed a scrap of paper and a pen.

_Your couch is lumpy_ , she wrote. _Tonight, Netflix and chill at my place. Emphasis on the chill._ She underlined the second chill once, then two more times. Anticipation was all well and fine, but she didn't want to wait forever. Wait too long in their business and there was nothing left to wait for.

She contemplated, for just a moment, adding a heart to the note—ironically, of course—but decided on restraint. Instead, she placed the note carefully on top of the blanket, where Sam was sure to find it, then headed for the elevator.

"My floor, JARVIS," she said as soon as the door to the elevator was closed.

"My pleasure, Ms. Romanoff," JARVIS said, and Nat didn't think it was her imagination that JARVIS sounded more than a little happy for her, in his reserved British AI way.

Once in her apartment, she kicked off her clothes and hopped into the shower, and then readied herself for the day. She threw her hair into a messy bun, grabbed her phone, and then headed off to the briefing Steve had scheduled with her.

When she got to the meeting room, Steve was waiting for her with two large travel coffee cups sitting in front of them and a grin on his face.

She ignored his good mood and reached over for the coffee cup he passed to her. She ignored him some more as she drank her coffee, a nice bold Kenyan roast with a hint of milk and no sugar, just the way she liked it. Then, when she'd finished half of the coffee and was ready, she finally gave him her full attention.

"So?" she prompted, wanting to get his nonsense over as soon as possible so they could concentrate on Avengers business.

"So?" he lobbed back. "How's Sam?" It was an innocent question, innocently delivered, but Nat wasn't fooled. And she was going to make Steve work for every scrap of information.

"Why don't you ask Sam?" she said, equally innocently, then took another sip of coffee.

"How are you _and_ Sam?" Steve parried back.

"Fine."

"Do anything special this weekend?"

"The usual. Dinner. Dancing. Meeting his mom."

Nat had expected a reaction, but not quite the reaction she got.

"You met Sam's mom?" Steve looked like he was restraining himself from jumping up like a little kid who'd just been told he was going to Disney World. "That's great! Isn't she great?! I think that's great!"

"Yes, Steve," she said, hiding her own enthusiasm for Darlene Wilson. "She's great. It was great. Now, can we get on to Avengers' business?"

"Yeah, sure, sure." Steve seemed like he couldn't stop grinning, and he played with his coffee cup as if he wasn't sure what to do with his hands. "It's just…I wanted you to know that we're really happy for both of you. Both of us are. Me and Bucky, I mean."

Nat tried to keep her expression impassive, but inside she felt a warm glow. She wondered if this was what it might have been like if she'd been allowed something like a normal teenage life, with friends she could talk with about a boy she liked instead of rivals she fought with for their instructors' approval.

"Thanks, Steve. That means a lot."

Steve smiled even wider, and his cheeks went pink, but then he cleared his throat and transformed from a giddy friend into Captain America, head of the Avengers.

"Okay, so let's look at this intel."

They spent the morning going through the reports that had come in about possible activity by AIM, pieces of a puzzle that didn't yet form a clear picture. There were fragments of intercepted transmissions from Seattle, a manifest of an unusual shipment to New Jersey and the disappearance of a medical researcher, one Dr. March, in California. Nothing definitive, but it was adding up to something Nat didn't like the look of at all. And neither did Steve.

"We should follow up on these," Steve said. "See where they lead."

"But where do we start?" Nat picked up one of the pages Steve had thrown on the table. 

"This Dr. March in California seems most pressing," Steve said. "We don't want AIM thinking they can kidnap people."

" _If_ he's been kidnapped." Nat had run into far too many people who'd joined up with AIM or Hydra or any of their enemy organizations on their own, and this Dr. March had seemed to be working on some ethically questionable research projects. Human beings could be so disappointing. "And anyway, the New Jersey lead is closer. We should check it out first."

"Jersey," Steve said with rolled eyes.

"Yeah, yeah, you and Barnes hate Jersey." She punched his arm. "We all know. But we might pull on a useful thread there."

"Fine." Honestly, she wondered if the Americans realized their national superhero could sound like a petulant kid when he was forced to go to the Garden state.

"Let's round up the gang for lunch." She pushed him towards the door. "We can hit Jersey after we eat and be back in time for dinner." Or, in her case, Netflix and chill with a certain winged Avenger.

They were moving to the door when JARVIS did the electronic equivalent of clearing his throat.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Captain. But Dr. Banner requires your presence in the lab."

"Right now?" Steve asked.

"It's a matter of some urgency," JARVIS insisted with his typical understatement.

JARVIS didn't have to say anything else. Steve and Nat hit Bruce's lab at a run.

Nat wasn't sure what they'd find. A fire. An explosion. The Big Guy. What they got was something of an anticlimax: Bruce watching a heads-up display of what seemed to be a map of New Jersey with a giant red dot blinking on it.

"Looks like we're definitely starting with Jersey," Nat told Steve as Bruce chewed on his lip.

* * *

Less than an hour later, Nat jogged into the warehouse with Steve, pulling her concentration to the job at hand: clearing a possible AIM outpost that was emitting what Bruce had assured them was nonlethal amounts of gamma radiation. She consciously didn't think about Sam maintaining the perimeter with the rest of the team, a flying target with metal wings. They were both adults, after all. They were both Avengers. They could look after themselves.

The interior of the warehouse was a dimly lit warren of cramped corridors, metal reinforced doors every few meters.

There was no one inside. No AIM flunkies in their stupid yellow suits, no warehouse workers. She could hear the hiss of the ventilation system and the echo of their footsteps, but there was no other sound but in the building. It had a feeling of an abandoned place, the air slightly stale.

She and Steve began the painstaking job of clearing the building, checking each room for threats and for the source of the radiation Bruce had detected, covering each other expertly as they took turns opening each room. They found nothing, except a cargo elevator, its gate raised as if it were waiting for them.

"After you, Steve," Nat said, and waved him inside. He checked the interior before he entered, and stood poised with his shield. She pulled the gate closed and looked around the cage they found themselves in. The elevator's control panel only had two buttons, marked 1 and B.

"Going down," she said, holding her own gun at the ready as she hit the B. "Next floor, ladies lingerie, freaky science experiments and weapons of mass destruction."

"I hope there's more of the former and less of the latter," Steve said as they began to descend.

"Why, Steve." She batted her eyelashes at him. "I didn't know you were into that sort of thing. Have you told Bucky?"

Steve rolled his eyes and kept his attention on the gate as they descended, while Nat suppressed a smile at the image of Steve and Bucky in lacy garters.

When they hit the elevator lurched to a stop, Nat glanced back at Steve. When he nodded, she raised the gate, holding her weapon in front of her, ready to shoot. But there weren't any enemies waiting for them in the basement, only more dimly lit, deserted corridors.

Nat moved out of the elevator, Steve behind her. They leapfrogged through the basement, again clearing each room as they went, again finding a whole lot of nothing. Right until they came to the last possible door.

This time, when Nat opened the door, she found not a dusty storage cupboard or an abandoned lab with empty shelves and benches, but a large chamber filled with banks of equipment. There were dials and digital readouts and, at the very end of the room, a silver capsule, eight feet high, standing on its end.

She approached the capsule cautiously, looking for some indication of what it did, even as something niggled in her memory. The capsule had several valves on its side, and a window near its top, too high for her to look into.

"What the hell is this thing?" she asked.

When Steve didn't say anything, she looked back at him. He was glaring at the capsule as if it had done him a personal wrong. She frowned, and was about to ask him what was wrong when Bucky's voice crackled over the comms.

"Steve, what's going on in there?"

"Standby," Steve said, his tone curt.

"Steve?" Nat said, now surer than ever that she should know what this thing was. And that Steve _did_ know.

"Can you get that thing working?" He pointed to the computer terminal on a lab table beside the capsule. It looked like it was connected to an old mainframe computer, but it wasn't anything she hadn't seen before.

"Sure." She powered up the terminal, waiting for a green cursor to start blinking at her before she started entering commands. She was relieved to find it was a UNIX system, or something as close as to make no difference, and started working out its file system. "It might help if I knew what I was looking for." She continued typing without looking back at him.

"Look for the key words Erskine, Zola or Rebirth."

_Now_ she knew what the capsule reminded her of.

"You think this thing is like what they used on you?"

"Maybe." She could see the muscles in his jaw clench. "It looks an awful lot like Howard's Vita-Ray device. And Bruce did use gamma radiation to try to reproduce the serum."

"But we all know how well that went for Bruce," Nat said. 

"I don't think AIM really cares about lab safety, do you?" Steve asked. "Keep looking, Nat."

She found a promising subfolder, buried deep in the system's directories, when there was a muffled thump that she felt more than heard.

"Explosion to the south," Sam said over the comms.

"Got it," Tony said.

"Keep your eyes peeled out there," Steve said, as he watched her progress over her shoulder. "It sounds like our AIM friends might be launching a diversion."

"No shit," Nat muttered to herself as she tried opening a promising file, and was stopped by a password.

"What have you found?" Steve said, his voice right in his ear as he leaned in closer to her.

"Give me a second." She launched a backdoor protocol, and the file finally opened, its contents streaming across the screen in sickly green pixels. As they read further in the file, it became more and more clear that Steve's instinct was right. AIM had been trying to reproduce Erskine's serum, with a few nasty twists of their own. Then she scrolled down and read the final paragraph of the file and felt a wash of cold terror travel down the length of her spine. Because this was so very much worse that she'd first thought.

"It's a trap," she said over the comms, and then both she and Steve were running, retracing their steps to the elevator. "Everyone, retreat to the Quinjet."

There was a crackle, and then she could hear Sam's voice, cutting through what sounded like the noise of battle.

"Wings are down. Tony, can you retrieve us?" 

She sped up further, nearly keeping up with Steve as they reached the elevator. She slammed the gate down and Steve hit the button that began their agonizingly slow ascent. The whole time they could hear their friends over the comms, fighting with their enemies. A fight whose purpose she now knew.

"Down," Bucky said, even as Nat could hear a whining explosion somewhere near him. "Your turn, Sam."

"All right, James." Sam sounded like he was trying to sound confident, but she could hear the fear in his voice behind the forced cockiness. She held her breath as they drew closer to the top of the elevator shaft, willing them to rise faster.

"C'mon, Sam," she whispered. "Get out of there."

With Steve beside her, she stood at the gate of the elevator, bouncing on the balls of her feet, ready to run as soon as they reached the top.

Then there was a sound like she'd never heard, a buzzing explosion in her ear that felt loud enough to deafen her.

"Sam!" Bucky yelled, just as the elevator came to a halt. 

Nat threw open the gate and was dashing down the corridor toward the exit with Steve at her heels.

"Sam!" she yelled herself, and burst out of the warehouse. Bucky was standing beside the Quinjet, looking up at the roof of the warehouse he'd left.

There was a flash on the roof, then, before the after-image of the flash had faded from her retina, Tony was beside them, dropping a battered Clint beside them.

"I'll get him," Tony said, already shooting up to the roof. He fired his repulsors once, and then dropped onto the roof and out of sight.

Nat stood, Steve and Clint on either side of her, straining to hear something, to _see_ something.

"Tony?" she asked after what felt far too long. "Do you have him?"

There was no answer.

Instead, Tony shot back into the air, then dropped to earth beside them. He flipped up the visor of his suit, and Nat wasn't sure she'd ever seen him look quite so hollowed out.

"Tony?" she tried again. "Where's Sam?"

Tony's answer was one, horrible word.

"Gone."

They searched the area for the better part of an hour, with Tony flying in ever-widening circles and the rest of them searching the building Sam had disappeared from the roof of, but they found no sign of Sam. The whole time, Nat felt a burning rage building in her aimed directly at whoever had snatched Sam, an emotion that was matched only by the panic she felt at the thought of what might be happening to him.

The only sign they found that Sam had been there at all was a piece of his wing that had been snapped off during the fight, and the only clue as to how he'd disappeared was a scorch line on the roof where Bucky told them the enemy had appeared.

"So, AIM has a transporter now," Clint said once they regrouped on the Quinjet. He looked deeply unimpressed with this news.

"Transporters are science fiction," Tony scoffed.

"Yeah, well, so are super soldiers and flying suits of armour, but we've got those," Clint helpfully pointed out.

"They're not the same thing," Tony said.

"Transporters or not, they have Sam," Steve said, stepping between Clint and Tony and cutting off any further argument.

"But why the hell did they want to kidnap an Avenger?" Clint asked. "I mean, they baited us here. Throw some gamma radiation around a New Jersey warehouse and you're not just going to get the local cops, are you? They knew we were the ones who were going to show up."

Steve didn't answer. Instead, he turned to where Nat was pacing the deck of the Quinjet, her hands clutched into fists, her chest tight with emotion.

With the eyes of her friends on her, she stopped her pacing and stood her ground, feet firmly planted.

"We found a capsule down there. It looked like what Erskine used on Steve. And then I found a computer file that outlined what AIM has been doing here." She stopped, took a deep breath and then let it out slowly, concentrating on releasing the tension that was building in the walls of her chest, in the pit of her belly. Only then did she go on. 

"They've been reverse-engineering Erskine's super soldier serum. They wanted a subject who'd been exposed to the serum, or a variation. They wanted Steve or Bucky or…me." Nat didn't often admit that she was a little more than human. But at the moment, all she cared about was getting Sam back, however that had to happen. 

"But Sam isn't a super soldier," Clint pointed out.

"No, he isn't," Steve said, his voice soft, his concerned expression directed at Nat.

"Then, what-" Clint started to say, but Steve cut him off.

"We're going to get him back, Nat," Steve said as they took off, his voice forceful, his Captain America voice. He turned to face Nat, and his expression was as determined as she'd ever seen it. "We'll get him back," he repeated, as if he could will the world to bow to his will. And Nat honestly hoped he could.

They were all silent on the short flight back to the Tower, each lost in their thoughts. 

Nat's own thoughts spun and fishtailed like a sports car in an ice storm, caught between cataloguing all the intelligence assets she had who might know something about where AIM would take a prisoner, and catastrophizing the horrific things AIM might do to a prisoner. Or an experimental subject.

It would have been bad if it had been any of her colleagues, her friends, but the fact that it was Sam… She'd just started to consider that whatever it was that had sprung up between them, they were both in it for the long haul, and now Sam had been taken from her. 

She was going to burn them down to the ground if they laid a finger on him.

* * *

The teachers of the Red Room had never taught their students healthy coping strategies. So, faced with Sam's disappearance, Nat did the only thing she could. She threw her feelings of panic and helplessness and loss in a box, locked it down, and hid it in a shadowed corner of her mind, a place where she could safely ignore it.

The rage, though…she didn't box up her rage. She kindled it. She encouraged it. She fuelled it until it was incandescent, until it could have lit up the night sky around her. She used the rage to power her search, to keep her working through the night and into the next day. 

Her rage kept her focused, kept her moving, kept her from despair. Right up until two days after they'd lost Sam, when she was striding through the Tower, on her way from Bruce's lab to Steve's command centre, and her phone pinged. When she pulled it out of her pocket, a text from Sylette glowed on the screen.

_pls tell my idiot brother to answer his damn phone. mom's worried about him._

Sam was the only one of their Avengers family who also had another family, a family by birth that lived in Harlem, not Avengers Tower, and Nat had managed to completely put that other family out of her mind for the two days Sam had been missing. Because if she acknowledged how Sam's disappearance would hurt Sylette and Mrs. Wilson, then she'd have to acknowledge how it hurt her. 

She stared at her phone screen, as the box in the corner of her mind rattled and shook and finally tore wide open, releasing all the unwanted feelings that threatened to overwhelm her. Not that anyone looking at her at that moment would have seen any change in her. She was too good a spy for that. She'd spent a lifetime suppressing her feelings, hiding them from anyone who could use them as a weapon against her.

But Sylette wasn't an enemy. She was Sam's family. She was Nat's friend. And difficult though it might be, Nat knew that she owed her the truth. Or a portion of it.

Nat might not have healthy coping strategies when it came to emotions, but she'd never backed down from a fight. She'd never turned away from things that were hard. So, she gripped her phone hard enough that the corners bit into her hand and made for the nearest empty room in the Tower.

"Lock the door, please, JARVIS," she said.

"Of course, Ms. Romanoff," JARVIS said. "And if I can be of assistance in any way, please let me know."

"Since you asked, please initiate privacy protocols on the call I'm about to make." Nat's phone was already as locked down as the collective paranoia of the Black Widow and Tony Stark could make it, but adding extra security when a civilian was involved couldn't hurt. They hadn't informed anyone outside of the Avengers about Sam's disappearance, and she didn't want a tap on Sylette's phone to be responsible for leaking that information.

"As you wish," JARVIS said, his usual plummy tones overlaid with a hint of sympathy.

Nat sat at the table in the room's centre. She put the phone in front of her, placed her hands flat on the table, making herself concentrate on the feel of the wood grain under her fingers, placing herself firmly in this moment. She ran through all the ways the conversation with Sylette could go, as if she were preparing for a mission, for an interrogation. And when she had a plan for every contingency, she finally picked up her phone and dialled the contact for Sylette.

"Hey, Nat," Sylette's voice came through, clear and bright, the voice of a woman who had no idea she was about to hear bad news. "You didn't have to call. I just wanted you to nudge that idiot brother of mine."

"Where are you?" Nat asked, keeping her voice relaxed, giving no hint of what she was about to reveal.

"I'm just heading out for lunch. I'm swamped, so I was going to grab a truck falafel."

"Are you in the elevator?" She could hear the shuffle and murmur of other people.

"Yeah."

"I want you to hang up, go back to your office, and then call me."

"What?" Sylette sounded more confused than worried, which was a relief. Sylette panicking in the elevator of her office was one of the worst contingencies she'd planned for.

"Please," Nat said. "Just trust me."

And thankfully, Sylette did.

"Okay. But this better involve a blackmail-level ridiculous story about my brother." Sylette hung up before Nat had a chance to respond.

Nat counted down two minutes and 43 seconds before her phone rang again.

"Okay," Sylette said. "I'm in my office. Now, what's up? Please tell me Sam has done something really dumb. I could use a laugh."

"Is the door closed?"

"Yeah."

"Are you sitting down?"

"Yes." Nat heard the beginning of fear creep into Sylette's voice. "What's going on, Nat?"

There was no way to soft-pedal this news, so Nat didn't even try.

"Sam's been kidnapped," she said, and heard a sharp intake of breath from Sylette. "We're looking for him," she continued, keeping her own voice calm and confident. "We're doing everything we can. I'll let you know as soon as we have any news."

"Kidnapped," Sylette breathed out the word as if she'd never heard it before and was trying to work out what it meant. 

"We're going to get him back." Nat put every ounce of determination in her voice. " _I'm_ going to get him back."

For a moment, all Nat could hear were hitching sobs from the other end of the line, and she wished she'd taken the time to do this in person, wished she was physically there for Sylette.

"I…" Sylette gave a hiccupping sob, then tried again. "I need to tell Mom." There was a pause, then Sylette spoke again, her voice tentative. "Can I tell Mom? Is that okay?"

"You can tell her." Nat was sorry now that she hadn't told the Wilsons what had happened to Sam right away. But she'd hoped more than anything that they'd get Sam back before it was even an issue. "I'll come with you," she blurted out, knowing right away it was the right thing to do. She may have only met Darlene Wilson days ago, but Sam's mom had been kind to her. She owed her kindness back.

"You don't have to," Sylette sniffed down the line.

"I _want_ to," Nat said. "There's a whole team of Avengers looking for Sam. I can spare the time for you and your mom."

"Thank you," Sylette said. That she didn't even both arguing with Nat told her she'd done the right thing.

"Stay tight in your office. I'll pick you up."

Nat made the drive through Manhattan tightly clutching the steering wheel of the Audi sedan she'd borrowed from Tony. (It was the most sedate car she'd driven in months, but she didn't want either Sylette or her mother to have to crawl into the cramped back seat of her Corvette.)

She picked up Sylette at the Department of Education office, then drove up to Harlem, to the school where Darlene Wilson had taught for 30 years and still volunteered two days a week.

Sylette hugged Nat hard when she got into the car, then clutched her arms around herself for the drive through Manhattan. When they explained the situation to the principal at Darlene's school, letting her know only that it was a family emergency, she'd let them use the teacher's lounge to tell Darlene what had happened. Nat had hung back at first, but Darlene quickly drew her, wrapping one arm around her daughter and the other around Nat as she sobbed.

Somehow, she got the two Wilson women back to Darlene's home, and made them tea while they sat in the cozy living room, clasping each other for comfort.

"I should be making _you_ tea," Darlene said between sobs when Nat placed a tea cup in front of her, her hostess instincts intact in spite of her pain.

"Not now, you shouldn't," Nat said. She sat carefully beside Darlene, and laid a tentative, supportive hand on her shoulder.

In spite of the hug at the school, Nat still wasn't prepared for Darlene leaning towards her and pulling her in tightly. She had to resist the instinct to pull back, to distance herself from this simple human connection, but in the end, Darlene simply wouldn't let her.

"You find my boy," Darlene whispered to her before finally letting her go. "You find him, and bring him home."

"I will," Nat promised. She'd never meant anything more.

* * *

Nat let her emotions get the better of her for the time it took her to drive back to the Tower. For those 30 minutes, she gripped the wheel of the car, and let her heart pound and her throat tighten and her mind race with endless, terrible possibilities. But as soon as she pulled into the Tower's parking garage, as soon as she stopped the engine and stepped out of the car, she once again boxed up all those untidy emotions, all of them save the rage, stuffed them in that back corner of her mind, and, with the rest of the Avengers, turned back to the job of finding Sam.

They all used their strengths. 

Bruce tapped into every civilian and military satellite he could access, and a few he shouldn't have been able to, and scanned for gamma radiation, for the sign that AIM was resuming their experiments. 

Tony glad-handed every military contractor he knew from before he'd gotten Stark Industries out of the weapons business, probing to find if one of them had teamed up with AIM to develop the prize of a super soldier serum. 

Clint and Bucky worked together. Clint tracked down every scumbag he'd ever had dealings with who might know what AIM was up to, and Bucky loomed over them until they told him everything they knew and then some. 

Steve was the leader, coordinating everyone else, working out the likeliest leads to pursue, readying himself to prepare a rescue plan for when they finally found Sam's location.

And Nat, she checked every corner of the dark net where AIM was known to haunt, visited every back room where they'd been known to make deals, called in every favour she was owed by people who'd had dealings with AIM. She flirted with men and women who had no idea who she was and gave up their secrets without knowing what they'd revealed. She interrogated others directly, using the terror the Red Room had taught her to use like a knife, slicing away at their strength and resolve until they surrendered all they knew. 

All that, and they came up with nothing. It was as if AIM had grabbed Sam and vanished from the face of the earth.

With each failure, her rage consumed more and more of her, until she felt like it filled her, felt like she was nothing but a vessel for that rage.

She began leaving more wreckage behind her, abandoning her usual subtlety for more brutal means.

She tore the door off a safehouse where a former AIM scientist had holed up, and the woman cowered and babbled, telling Nat what pathetically little she knew.

She used her fists on a mercenary she knew had worked for AIM, and who was foolish enough to think he was a match for the Black Widow. He didn't last long, and gave up every location he'd guarded for AIM through broken teeth and bloodied lips, every one of them long since abandoned. 

None of it seemed enough, and she felt like she was inching down the trail that led to Sam, taking single tottering steps towards him when there were hundreds of miles left to go.

Then she found one more scientist, one who'd recently left AIM, one who required violence before his fear of the Black Widow overcame his fear of AIM's retribution. And when he finished crying and shaking and spilling his secrets, she tossed the man in the Quinjet she'd taken to this Godforsaken part of rural Ohio, flew back to New York, handed the man over to the Avengers' FBI liaison and went straight to Steve.

"They already have what they think is a viable formula," she told him, her shoulders tight and her fists clenched. "They wanted you as confirmation, but they already have a formula they're ready to test. And they're looking for subjects to test it on. Subjects who are strong and fit and ex-military."

She saw the same horror in his eyes that she felt in her own when the scientist had given her the AIM project's criteria for test subjects.

"People like Sam," Steve said.

Nat nodded, feeling the rage crowd every last part of Natasha Romanoff out of her skin.

"We have to find him, Steve." Her own voice sounded harsh and foreign in her ears. "We have to find him before they try the formula on him."

They couldn't let that happen to Sam. 

Because the chances of AIM having produced a working formula when so many had failed before them were vanishingly small, and whether Sam died by a bullet or a flawed formula burning through his bloodstream, he would be just as dead.

And if it worked, Nat didn't like to think what AIM would do to an enemy they'd given the strength of Captain America.

"We will," Steve said, pulling himself up to his full height. "We'll get him back."

* * *

It was Bruce with his satellites who finally found Sam.

Three satellites picked up the ghost of a gamma radiation burst. The radiation wasn't as strong as the one that had lured them to New Jersey, and it didn't last nearly as long, but there was enough of it that Bruce could trace it back to a small city in Pennsylvania.

"It could be nothing," Bruce said. In front of him, a heads-up display showed a map of Youngstown, with a glimmer of red blinking just outside its borders.

"Gamma radiation at that intensity doesn't just happen," Tony said, crossing his arms and frowning at the display. "And it looks exactly like the sort of rust belt, no-horse town where AIM would set up shop."

"JARVIS," Steve said, "Can you give us real-time surveillance footage of the area and full blueprints of the building where the radiation was detected?"

"Give me a moment, Captain," JARVIS said. There was only a slight pause before a satellite view of the neighbourhood of an abandoned steel mill appeared in front of them. Thirty seconds more, and an interactive set of blueprints of the central building glowed in the air before them.

Tony began to pull apart the blueprints with a series of practiced gestures in the air, Bruce beside him.

"Look at that." Bruce pointed to a large open area in the blueprints. "That's the old steel furnace. There'd be a lot of concrete and insulation there."

"Which might have provided some shielding for gamma radiation," Tony continued the thought.

"Which would explain why the burst the satellites detected was less intense than we saw in Jersey," Bruce finished up. "I think we've got a location for your gamma ray chamber." Bruce looked at Nat in grim satisfaction.

"And this bit, here." Tony pointed out a series of large concrete bays in the side of the mill. "If you were looking to hold prisoners, that wouldn't be a bad place to do it."

"All right," Steve said. "Those will be our main targets. Clint, you keep an eye on the satellite feed, make sure they're not moving anywhere, with Sam or without him. Everyone else, let's get an infil plan in order. I want wheels up on the Quinjet in 15 minutes."

They all approached the planning with a ruthless efficiency, all too aware of the cost if they failed. It was amazing how losing one of their own could focus the Avengers' attention. There was no arguing, just absolute agreement on what needed to be done to get Sam back alive. They'd go in together, all of them, even the Hulk, and they'd save Sam. 

In the end, they were in the air in ten minutes, not 15. 

Nat spent the short flight checking all her gear—Widow's bites, Glocks, garrotte, spare clips—as Steve took them through further refinements of a plan that was little more than hit them fast and hard. Bucky sat beside her, checking his own gear over, a grim frown on his face.

"He'll be fine," Bucky said a minute out from their destination. He knocked her shoulder with his own. "We'll get him back."

Nat looked over at him, then Steve and Tony and Bruce. They all had the same expressions of concern and determination, and she knew with them at her side, they wouldn't fail Sam.

"Touch down in ten," Clint said over the comms as they approached the outskirts of Youngtown, and Nat felt her heart beat faster, adrenaline pouring into her system.

"Everyone knows what to do," Steve said as they all poised waiting for the rear ramp to drop. "Let's do this." 

Then the Quinjet hit the tarmac and the ramp opened and Bruce was turning green and angry, and Nat was running, following the Hulk as he tore open the reinforced door to the old steel mill like it was a flimsy tin can.

They all knew their roles. 

The Hulk sped ahead, causing chaos and mayhem where he went, making it difficult for AIM to regroup and organize against the intruders. Steve and Bucky followed in his wake, heading for the concrete bays where they thought any prisoners might be kept. Clint kept near the hole torn in the side of the old steel mill, keeping their route for retreat clear of the enemy. Tony was their eye in the sky, making sure that their enemies didn't escape with Sam, and that no reinforcements arrived for them.

And Nat headed straight to the former furnace room Bruce and Tony thought the likeliest location for the gamma ray chamber. She'd pushed for that assignment, working on a hunch that the burst of radiation Bruce had detected was AIM getting ready for a full-blown test of their super soldier chamber with a human subject. With Sam. And she wasn't going to let them get away with that.

There was movement ahead of her, then ricochets of bullets and flashes of blue. She ducked and fired, working entirely on instinct as she avoided being shot and took out all the AIM flunkies blocking her progress.

She ran into two more groups of AIM foot soldiers on her way to the furnace, and took them all down without breaking her stride. But the sound of voices ahead of her made her stutter to a halt.

The first voice was too low for her to hear what it was saying, a low mutter that seemed to go on forever, but then the other voice sounded, clear and strong.

"Man, do what you're gonna do, or shut the hell up."

She thought she'd been running at her top speed before, but now she ran even faster, racing towards the furnace room ahead, towards Sam.

She flew into the furnace area, trusting that her reflexes were faster than any AIM soldier's. She took down two men just inside the space, and then two more hovering at the edge of the equipment that took up most of the furnace room. Which left two people standing in the centre of the space: Sam Wilson and a pinch-faced man in a lab coat with a gun to Sam's head and an arm around his throat.

"Hey, Nat," Sam said, his voice as calm as if he was waiting at the coffee shop for the latest episode of Dumbasses in Love. "You're late."

"Hey, Sam," she replied, keeping her own voice just as calm, in spite of the fear and rage spiking through her system. "We had a bit of trouble finding you."

Sam was battered, his face bruised, one cheek scabbed over, his Falcon uniform dirty and torn, but he was alive. And Nat was going to keep him that way. 

"Yeah, my host ain't too good with directions."

"Shut up, both of you," Lab Coat said. Nat turned in the man's direction and realized she recognized him. It was Dr. March, the missing scientist they'd heard about before this mess had started.

"Me, I'm not so good with shutting up," Nat said, edging closer to them both, holding herself ready to pounce on any opening.

"She really isn't," Sam said, and in spite of everything, in spite of being kidnapped, in spite of having a gun to his head, he gave Nat one of his most brilliant grins. Nat felt a surge of affection for Sam flood through her and engulf her.

But she didn't have time to take in the feeling. Because March chose that moment to aim his gun at her. She ducked behind a concrete pillar just before he pulled the trigger, but she still caught a piece of ricocheting concrete on her cheek before she dropped completely behind the pillar.

"Don't," Sam said, and Nat could hear the concern in his voice. "Don't you dare hurt her."

"I'll do what I like," March said. 

"Let's see how that works out for you, long term," Sam said, and Nat couldn't help but be proud of him, defiant in the face of their enemy. But then there was the sound of a scuffle and a moan, and when she peeked around the corner of her pillar hiding place she could see fresh blood on Sam's face.

"Long term, I see it working out quite well," March said as he started dragging Sam over to a bench, further away from Nat's position. March was either stronger than he looked, or Sam was in worse shape than he looked. Or both. She very much hoped it wasn't both. 

"Status, Nat," Steve said in her ear.

"I've found Sam," she said curtly, not wanting even the slightest distraction from her prey.

"Everyone, rally on Nat's position," Steve said, and as much as she wanted to take out this man herself for hurting Sam, she was glad her teammates were on their way to help.

"Snap these in place," March said, and when Nat risked a glance around the pillar, she saw he'd handed Sam what looked like two oversized metal bracelets designed by Doctor Frankenstein. When Sam didn't act quickly enough, March tightened the hold on Sam's throat, and he reluctantly snapped the bracelets in place on both of their wrists.

"You're going to need more than jewelry to get out of here," Nat said, even as she was remembering the flash of blue that had come before Sam's disappearance.

"We'll see," March said, and then he picked up the last bracelet from the table in front of him and dropped it on the floor. Before Nat could react, he stomped on it, and she heard the crunch of breaking metal and glass.

"You're not taking me anywhere," Sam said, and began to struggle. Nat raised her arm, thinking she could take out March with a Widow's Bite if she had a clear shot. But before she could act, March dragged Sam over to an arch she hadn't notice, keeping Sam between himself and her. He punched several buttons with the hand still holding his gun. An electric whine began to fill the room, and the arch began to pulse.

Nat suddenly knew exactly how AIM had grabbed Sam from that rooftop in Jersey. And she wasn't about to let that happen again. She sprinted forward, not caring at all for her own safety, desperate to get to Sam before March could drag him through that arch to God knew where. And Sam started to struggle again, pulling toward her.

Before she could reach Sam, March struck him in the side of the head with his weapon and hit one last button. As soon as a curtain of blue light formed in the arch, March dragged Sam through it. The light flashed bright enough to make Nat's eyes tear, and then Sam, March and the light were all gone.

"Fuck." Nat crossed the remaining distance to the arch, but Sam was truly gone. She bent down and picked up the crushed bracelet on the floor. The bracelet was the one way for her to get Sam back, and it was shattered. She felt panic rising in her throat, but swallowed it back down. Panic wouldn't help fix the bracelet and find Sam. But luckily, they had a resident genius on the team who was rather good at fixing things. 

"Tony, I need you here now," she said.

Steve and Bucky arrived in the furnace room first, followed by Tony, with Clint and the Hulk taking up the rear. All of them looked concerned, even the Hulk, but it was Bucky who asked the question all of them wanted answered.

"Where's Sam?"

Nat looked at the arch, then back at her teammates, her friends.

"One of our AIM friends dragged him through that." She nodded at the arch. "And they were each wearing one of these." She held out the smashed bracelet in both hands.

"So, AIM _does_ have a transporter," Clint said, sounding extremely unimpressed with that information. "What are they, the fucking Federation?"

"That's not Star Trek," Tony said, approaching the arch and flipping up his visor. "That's leftover Chitauri tech. Some sort of portal."

"Can you get it working?" Nat asked, trying to sound steadier than she felt. "Can you fix this?" She placed the smashed bracelet on the nearest table.

Tony gave the arch one last look, then strode over to the table. He removed his gauntlets and poked at the bracelet, then walked around the room, collecting a soldering iron and various fine tools before he returned to the remnants of the bracelet.

"I'll fix it, Romanoff," Tony said. "We'll get him back."

Steve and Bucky stood on either side of Nat, Steve resting a comforting hand on her shoulder, while Clint and the Hulk kept watch behind them, protecting them from a possible AIM counterattack. She ignored all of them, all of her attention on Tony as he began piecing the smashed bracelet back together.

She tried to be patient, she really did, but she was also all too aware that every minute that passed was one more minute Sam was being taken away from her. She began pacing the length of the room as the metallic stink of solder began to pervade the space.

After what felt like far too long, she finally paused in front of the work bench.

"Tony," she said, the name a question and a warning and a plea.

"Romanoff," Tony said without looking up from the bracelet in his hands. "This is like putting together a jigsaw when you don't know what picture is on the box, so could you please back off for a minute."

She did manage to back off for a minute, resuming her pacing, but worry brought her back to Tony's bench far too soon.

"Tony…" she tried again.

"Nat, if you don't want to end up turned inside out when you use this thing, please…"

Steve took her by the arm and pulled her away.

"Tony knows what he's doing," he said. "Just give him space."

And she knew that. She knew Tony was the best person, the _only_ person, who could fix that bracelet and get it to do whatever it was supposed to do, who could get her in place to save Sam. But it didn't make it any easier to let go, to let him do what he needed to do while she just stood around and did nothing.

She nodded at Steve, and pulled her arm from his grasp and did not let the scream of frustration building in her throat escape from between her teeth. Instead she went over to a pillar, leaned against it as nonchalantly as she could manage and started checking over every weapon she had on her, all the while very definitely not looking in Tony's direction.

"Here," Bucky said, passing her three extra clips for her Glocks. 

"Thanks, Barnes." She took the clips, slotting them in to replace the empty ones she'd already discarded on the fight to get to this room.

"Any time, Romanoff. Just do me a favour and bring Wilson back in one piece. I haven't finished teaching him everything I know."

That teased the ghost of a laugh out of her, that she struggled not to turn into a sob. She leaned her forehead against Bucky's shoulder, and didn't say a word about him going soft as he rubbed his right hand in soothing circles on her back.

She was calm and focused by the time Tony finally stood up straight and said "It's done."

"About time, Stark," she said, pulling away from Bucky and putting her game face back on.

"I'd really like to test this thing before you stick it on your wrist and let it scramble your molecules or suck you through a space vortex or whatever the hell it does." Tony was putting on his best blasé expression, but she could she the concern in his eyes.

"No time," she said firmly, and then snapped the thing on. It wasn't pretty, the solder lines holding it together visible and ugly, like scars from an operation performed by a butcher instead of a surgeon, but she trusted Tony with her life. 

"I've built a tracker into the bracelet." And of course, Tony would do that. "We'll follow you, when you get where you're going."

"Thanks, Tony. Can you operate that thing?" She pointed to the console beside the arch.

Tony gave it a cursory look and shrugged. 

"Let's give it a go, shall we. After all, how hard can it be, operating alien tech to open a portal to send you who the hell knows where?" Tony moved to the console and started examining the controls.

"As long as you know what you're doing." She squared her shoulders and prepared for whatever the arch was going to do to her.

"Don't you know? I always know what I'm doing." 

Just this once, Nat chose to believe Tony's bullshit.

"Then let's do this." 

"You take care of yourself, Nat," Steve said, Bucky standing close behind him.

She nodded at Steve, then turned back to Tony.

"Okay, Shellhead," she said. "Turn this fucking thing on."

Tony hit the same combination of buttons that Lab Coat had, and a curtain of blue lightning formed in the arch. She held her breath, bounced on the balls of her feet, then ran towards it.

The world dissolved in a flash of ice blue fire, fire that seared every nerve in her body. For a second, a minute, an eternity, she was held immobile in the fire, and then just as suddenly she was released. Instinctively, she dropped into a shoulder roll, ending up on one knee. For a moment she wasn't entirely sure that she _hadn't_ been turned inside out. But then she realized that her chest was heaving, she was pulling air into her lungs, and the gravel from rough tarmac was digging into her knee.

She was struck by a wave of vertigo and closed her eyes tightly for a second until it passed. Then she opened them and stood, finding herself in front of a hangar of what seemed to be a small private airport. There were planes scattered around her, single and twin engine Beechcrafts and Cessnas and Pipers, and two men in mechanics overalls standing at the threshold of the hangar, staring at her in shock, their jaws both dropped.

“Have either of you seen two men pass this way? One in a beat-up flight suit, one in a white lab coat?” she asked, as if was perfectly normal to appear out of nowhere.

Both men pointed behind her without saying a word.

"Thank you," she said, then turned and ran in the direction they'd pointed, hoping against hope that Sam was somehow still near enough for her to find, keeping to the cover of planes as she went.

She was nearly to the end of the tarmac, approaching the last cluster of planes and fearing that she was going to have to get Tony to pull the flight plan of every plane that had left this airport in the last hour, when she heard Sam's voice.

"You put me in the pilot seat of that thing and we're both going to die."

"But you can fly." March's voice sounded exasperated, as if they'd been having this argument for a while.

"With the wings, man. I'm not a pilot."

Nat eased closer to where the voices were coming from, and then there they were, standing in front of a Gulfstream with its door open. Sam was facing her, and looked more pissed and annoyed than scared, and damn, if that wasn't Sam all over. March had his back to her, and his gun pointed at Sam.

She saw the second when Sam clocked her presence, a minute widening of his eyes, but fortunately March didn't notice a thing. Nat carefully edged closer to them, keeping out of March's field of view. Her palm itched with the urge to pull out one of her Glocks and shoot the bastard in the back, but she knew he'd give them useful information if they took him alive. She just had to get him in range of her Widow's Bite. Then, just as she thought she was close enough, Sam did the stupidest thing.

"What the hell is _that_?" Sam asked, looking straight at her.

March turned towards her, swinging his aim away from Sam. Before Nat could move or shoot or yell "What the _fuck_ , Wilson?", Sam had moved forward and grabbed March's gun hand. He gave the man's wrist a ferocious twist and had the gun from him in a moment. One punch to the gut, and March dropped to his knees, where Sam gave him a vicious kick to the head. March flopped down on the tarmac, out cold.

Sam stood there, looking at her with his most brilliant grin.

"Hey, Nat," he said as if he'd just come back from a trip to the local bodega. "How's it going?"

"Sam…" Too many emotions whirled through Nat's head for her to sort through. Fury, frustration, exasperation, relief, she felt them all.

She ran towards him, enveloping him in the strongest hug she'd ever given anyone.

"Sam, you idiot," she said, her voice muffled in his chest. "Don't you ever do that to me again."

"I'll try not to," Sam said, and he hugged her back, just as tightly.

Her emotions swirled and blurred and fused and she realized exactly what she was feeling.

"I love you, Sam Wilson," she said, and clutched Sam to her as hard as she could.

"That's good. Because I love you, too, Natasha Romanoff." Sam leaned down and kissed her, a kiss that tasted of copper from his split lip, a kiss that wasn't at all gentle, a kiss that was as perfect as she'd ever had.

After far too long and not nearly long enough, Sam pulled away. And to her annoyance, he started laughing.

"What's the matter, Wilson?" She swatted at his shoulder. "Declarations of love funny to you?"

"No." He leaned in to give her a quick kiss. "Not at all. I was just thinking, you know what this makes us, us being in love and all?"

"Shit," she said as she came to the same realization that he had. "We are Dumbasses in Love."

"Yes, we are," Sam said, and he didn't look at all upset about it.

"Steve and Bucky aren't going to let this go."

"No, they are not." And Sam still didn't look anything but absolutely happy. "But think about it. The shit we've given them, we totally deserve it."

"That we do." Nat pulled Sam down and kissed him again, this one not at all quick. They didn't let go of each other until the Quinjet landed on the tarmac near them.

* * *

They didn't have to wait long for the others. The airport was only a few towns over from the AIM lab, and the Quinjet made short work of the distance. Steve and Tony took charge of March, while Bucky hauled out the first aid kit and helped Nat check Sam's injuries.

"You're a mess, Wilson," Bucky said, as he taped up an abrasion on Sam's ribs.

"Pfft," Sam said, squirming as Nat cleaned a tender area under his eye. "This is nothing. I've gotten worse than this sparring with you, Barnes."

"You better not have," Nat said, and turned a glare on Bucky.

"I've never hurt a hair on his head, Nat," Bucky said, with his hands up in surrender.

"Hmmph." Nat turned back to Sam, cleaning yet another contusion. By the time they got to New York, she was satisfied they'd bandaged up the worst of the damage, but she still wasn't going to leave Sam's health to chance. 

"Let's go to medical," Nat said as she took his elbow and steered him towards the elevator, trusting Steve to look after their AIM guest.

"I don't need to go to medical," Sam insisted. "It's all superficial."

Nat fixed him with the steeliest glare she could manage. She might be in love with Sam, but that didn't mean she was going to let him get away with not looking after himself.

"It is Nat." He grabbed her hand and threaded their fingers together. "I promise. All I really want to do is go home and go to bed."

Nat looked down at the hands joined together, and squeezed Sam's hand harder.

"Tell you what. You swear on your mother's life that there's nothing serious wrong with you—no concussion, no internal bleeding—and I'll take you home. But you have to promise me you'll go for a full check up in the morning, Sam Wilson."

"I swear and I promise."

"And you have to let me stay with you." Sam grinned. "For safety reasons, you idiot. I want to make sure you don't bleed out in the night."

"You can stay with me for whatever reasons you want, Nat." Sam grinned even wider.

"It's a good thing I love you, Sam," Nat said, and then she hugged Sam and kissed him as thoroughly as she had on the tarmac of that rundown airport.

"Get a room, you two," Bucky yelled at them from across the roof.

"I'm trying to, man," Sam yelled back at him, just as the elevator opened for them.

Nat pulled Sam into the elevator, and then into his flat. She made him drink water and eat some Pop Tarts she found in his kitchen. She got him out of his ruined Falcon uniform and into a pair of sweatpants and a well-worn Airforce t-shirt. She resisted getting handsy with him as he used her for support while stepping into the sweatpants, then got him settled in his bed, fluffed his pillows and tucked him in.

He grabbed her hand as she started to stand.

"Please tell me you're not sleeping on the couch this time."

"Not unless you want me to." She squeezed his fingers tightly.

"That is the opposite of what I want," Sam said, his expression soft and his voice slightly gravelly.

"Good," she said. She stripped out of her Widow jumpsuit, borrowed an SI t-shirt from Sam's drawer, and crawled into bed beside him. She put one arm gently over him, careful to avoid the worst of the bumps and scrapes that scattered his body.

He turned towards her, and their lips met, gently this time. Nat felt sparks light up her skin everywhere she touched Sam, and everywhere she wanted him to touch. She raised one hand, her fingertips brushing his cheek, his throat, his shoulder, as they kissed, their touches more tender than they'd allowed themselves before. This was no frantic fumble in the back of Tony's limo, and it was for far more than fun.

Nat let her hand drift further, down Sam's side, down to his hip, as he tangled his hand in her hair. She was nibbling at his jaw, teeth and lips eliciting a moan from Sam, when she must have hit a sore spot. Sam winced and hissed in pain, and Nat pulled back, not wanting to hurt him any more.

"You okay?" she asked, cupping his face gently with her palm.

"Yeah, it's just…" He trailed off.

"I know, babe." She stroked his cheek tenderly, and touched his lips softly with her own. 

"Not that I don't want to," Sam said quickly. "But…" 

"It's okay. We can wait." She kissed him again. "Probably should wait." Another kiss. "Until medical checks you out."

He didn't argue, which told her all she needed to know about how he was feeling. He kissed her one more time, then relaxed back into his pillow. Nat turned to face him, her palm lightly resting on the one part of his stomach she knew wasn't bruised.

Nat watched as Sam slowly drifted to sleep, and kept watch over him until sleep claimed her late in the night.


	3. Epilogue

They hadn't even cleared the door of Tatiana's when Irina spotted Bucky from her place at the hostess stand.

"Yasha, _lyubov moya_!"* She came running over to where they were standing, all big hair, big jewelry and big heart, and gave him the obligatory three air kisses. "And Natalia!" Nat got more air kisses. "Sam, welcome back!" Sam got away with just an enthusiastic hug. 

Steve, though, Steve got crossed arms and Irina's most forbidding glare.

"So, Captain America, you finally come back to my establishment."

"Hi, Irina." Steve looked as abashed as he had when Sister Mary Margaret had discovered he'd filled up his math exercise book with sketches, most of them of Bucky. And Irina looked as ready to box Steve's ears as the nun had. "Nice to be back?" Steve didn't sound sure at all.

"Hmmph." Irina turned back to Bucky. "You will make sure he dances. And that he comes back with you next time." She snapped her fingers and was back to being all smiles. "Now, all of you follow me. You have best table in house!"

Irina led them all to a table at the edge of the dance floor, where a small army of wait staff was waiting for them to decide if it was a vodka night or a champagne night.

"I think it's a night for both," Bucky told them, smiling when he heard Sam moan.

"It's all right for you super soldiers, but some of us are going to have hangovers in the morning," he said.

"Don't worry, Sam." Nat patted his arm and then passed him a shot of vodka. "I'll look after your hangover." Then she downed her own shot in one swallow. " _Za lyubov_!"**

" _Za lyubov_? Really?" Bucky scoffed. "If you're starting out _that_ sentimental, Romanoff, you've got nowhere to go."

"I'm Russian, Barnes. I can always get more sentimental."

"I don't know what either of you are talking about," Sam said.

"Trust me, Sam," Steve said. "It's better that way." He downed his own shot. " _Za lyubov_."

"Za whatever," Sam said, tossed back his shot, and grimaced. "Man, I am not a vodka person."

"Champagne?" one of the hovering waiters asked him, bottle held at the ready.

"Sure," Sam said. "Hit me."

It had been Bucky's idea to go dancing at Tatiana with their fellow Dumbasses in Love.

"You just want to drag me onto a dance floor," Steve had told him.

"You're absolutely right, sweetheart," Bucky had responded with a wolfish grin. "You don't want to waste all those lessons with Sam's Auntie Nichole, do you?"

Steve had grumbled, like he had when Nat had suggested Bucky take him to Sam's aunt's dance school to finally get rid of those two left feet. But he'd finally agreed to both, so, here they all were, dressed sharp and ready to celebrate.

They had a lot to celebrate.

Sam's rescue from AIM for one. And the fact that they'd since hunted down every last location where those AIM idiots been working on the new super soldier formula and burned them to the ground. (Helen Cho had analyzed the formula and concluded it would have killed anyone they'd given it to. Nat had hugged Sam extra hard when they'd gotten that news.)

Mostly, though, they were celebrating Nat and Sam.

It had taken Nat all of three days to move in with Sam after they'd rescued him from AIM.

("Hey, I kinda rescued myself," Sam had insisted. "Sure, you did," Nat had replied with a nudge.)

Not that it hadn't been a long time coming.

Bucky and Steve had set up daily coffee dates in the Tower not long after Bucky finally got Hydra's triggers yanked out of his head and moved in with Steve. Steve got so wrapped up in Avengers business that Bucky wanted to make sure he had at least one break every day, and if that meant he got to see Steve at the same time, so much the better.

On their second coffee date, Bucky had noticed Sam and Nat staring at them from across the coffee shop.

On their fifth coffee date, Bucky had heard what they were saying.

"They called us dumbasses in love," he'd said, not entirely sure whether to be offended or amused.

"I ain't the dumb one, sweetheart," Steve had said, giving him his biggest, goofiest smile and holding his hand even tighter.

"Aw, I love it when you call me sweetheart," Bucky had fired back, deciding to ignore the fact that Steve had also called him dumb. Any of the Howlies would have confirmed that the dumb one in this partnership was the one who went around carrying a shield with a target on it and throwing perfectly good motorcycles at Nazis.

Bucky hadn't paid any more attention to Sam and Nat for the first few weeks, more interested in spending time with his boyfriend. But then he'd started noticing more and more how the two of them acted around each other. And he'd realized they weren't the only dumbasses in this coffee shop.

"Do you think they know they've got it bad for each other?" he'd asked Steve one day.

"Nah. They're both too cool for that."

"Jeez, they're almost as clueless as we were."

"I wasn't clueless!" Steve had insisted. "I just didn't know if you wanted to be my best guy."

"Like I said, clueless." Because if there was one thing Bucky had never tried to hide from Steve, it was how much he loved him.

Even seeing what he'd seen, he'd decided not to say anything to either of the clueless dumbasses in question. Not until Clint had asked him to help Sam out on the gun range, and Sam had turned out to be a totally decent guy, exactly the sort of guy Natasha deserved. Then, Bucky had _had_ to say something.

And he had to hand it to them, it hadn't taken them long after that to go out, even if had taken them for-fucking-ever and one kidnapping to realize what he and Steve had seen from the start: that they were totally gone on each other.

And they were still gone on each other. Bucky smiled as he watched them link arms and drink from each other's champagne flutes. They were going to be so drunk by the end of the night—Sam more than Nat—but that's why they had Happy waiting on call to pick them all up. (Happy had made Bucky promise that absolutely no one would be making out in the back of the limo this time or he'd have to find someone else to watch Downton Abbey with.)

Irina's army of waiters continued to keep their glasses and plates full, and Tatiana's singers did their usual bang up job. (Bucky may or may not have bribed Irina to have them dedicate _Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen_ to Steve. No one could prove a Goddamn thing.)

When the dancing started, Sam and Nat took to the floor, every bit as amazing as they'd bragged being, and obviously totally in love.

"They look great together," Steve said. 

"That, they do. And so will we." Bucky held out his hand. "Let's join them."

"I don't know."

"C'mon." Bucky stood, and pulled Steve to his feet. "I don't want to have to tell Auntie Nichole that her lessons were wasted."

"I definitely don't want you telling Auntie Nichole that," Steve said, going even paler than usual. Not that Bucky blamed him. The first time they'd met Auntie Nichole, at the thank-God-my-son-is-alive party Sam's mom had thrown the Sunday after the whole kidnapping thing, she'd reminded Bucky of Steve's ma, sweet and sociable and sympathetic. But when they'd gone to her studio for Steve's dance lessons, she'd turned into a drill sergeant who'd have put the fear of God into Nick Fury.

"Then, c'mon." He dragged Steve onto the dance floor and got him in position for a simple two step, one hand firmly on Steve's waist, the other holding Steve's hand in a tight grip. "Just follow my lead."

Steve clenched his jaw and tightened his shoulders and looked at Bucky liked he'd just asked him to take on a Hydra base solo. But then Bucky pulled him in close, and planted a quick kiss on the corner of his jaw. Steve stiffened for a moment, then he smiled, and Bucky could feel his body relax against him.

"All right," Steve said. "Let's see how many times I can step on your toes."

In the end, Steve only stepped on Bucky's toes twice, and the second time was because he stopped suddenly to watch Sam and Nat tango.

They clapped as Sam and Nat spun and twirled across the dance floor, arms and legs flashing. And they cheered along with everyone else in the club as the music ended and Sam dramatically dipped Nat, both of them glowing with happiness and pride and love.

**Author's Note:**

> Russian Translations  
> * _lyubov moya_ = My love  
> ** _Za lyubov_ = To love
> 
> The title is courtesy Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds and their song If I Had a Gun.
>
>> If I had a gun  
> I'd shoot a hole into the sun  
> And love would burn this city down for you
> 
>  
> 
> The master Tumblr post for this collaboration can be found [here](https://keire-ke.tumblr.com/post/185658307044/title-shoot-a-hole-into-the-sun-link-to).
> 
> Tatiana is a [real place](https://www.thrillist.com/eat/new-york/the-last-great-russian-supper-club-nyc), as is [Masha and the Bear](https://www.mashaandthebear.nyc). Alas, [Tatiana was burned in a fire on the boardwalk](https://ny.eater.com/2019/4/15/18311802/tatiana-fire-brighton-beach-boardwalk-brooklyn-nyc) and is, for the moment, closed, and Masha and the Bear has permanently shut down.


End file.
